Patron saint festival In 54 days
Feast of Saint Ambrose
📅 Every year, on 7 December
On 7 December Montegrino Valtravaglia celebrates its patron Saint Ambrose; the town also preserves its historic Teatro Sociale.
The name of this comune is longer than the comune, and it tells of a merger that only half worked. The neighbouring village of Bosco, anciently Bosco Visconti, was a community of its own; in the Napoleonic period, in 1809, it became a frazione of Montegrino, but with the birth of the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom, in 1815, it took back its autonomy, and in 1863 gave itself the official name of Bosco Valtravaglia. In 1927 fascism put the pieces together again: Montegrino, Bosco and Grantola were merged into a new comune, called precisely Montegrino Valtravaglia. It did not entirely hold. In 1957 Grantola asked for and obtained a return to autonomy, recovering exactly the territory it had before the merger; Bosco did not ask, and stayed. The «Valtravaglia» that stands today in the comune's name is therefore the inheritance of a village that has been a comune twice and twice stopped being one.
On the origin of Montegrino not even the scholars agree. According to the most widely followed hypothesis it would come from acer, the maple — agher in the old dialect, agra in the plural — and would allude to the vast maple woods that once covered the mountain above the village; according to another it would be a compound of «monte» and a Germanic personal name, such as Agrimo. The coat of arms, granted by decree of the President of the Republic of 10 October 1962, brings together exactly the things the name is arguing about: a square tower with Ghibelline merlons, flanked by four trees and founded on the green plain, a sheet of water rising from the point of the shield and, against the sky-coloured background, the profile of a mountain. At Bosco, moreover, there was even a station: it stood on the Valganna railway, inaugurated in 1903, and served as the terminus of the Valcuvia tramway, running between 1914 and 1949. It was closed in 1955.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Montegrino Valtravaglia 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Montegrino Valtravaglia
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Montegrino Valtravaglia, but an easy day trip away.
Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola 📍 Carpi · 11 km Jesuit church of 1670-1682 in Carpi, on a Greek-cross plan, with scagliola altars and the diocesan museum. Basilica cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta 📍 Carpi · 11 km Carpi cathedral begun in 1514 to Peruzzi's design, reopened in 2017 after the 2012 earthquake. Chiesa di Santa Maria in Castello 📍 Carpi · 12 km Romanesque pieve of 1184, the oldest church in Carpi, with a Peruzzi façade and twelfth-century frescoes. Chiesa di San Bernardino da Siena 📍 Carpi · 12 km Patron church of Carpi, begun in 1604, with the reliquary bust of Saint Bernardino of Siena.