Dicomano

It has never been settled whether the name of the village comes from the river Comano, which joins the Sieve here, or refers to a Roman fortified camp crossed by a decumanus. At San Martino a Poggio, in the hamlet of Frascole, there is an archaeological area open in summer which encloses an ancient Etruscan settlement and a large building nobody can account for: a defensive bastion, or the podium of a temple never finished. And from the medieval centre of Dicomano starts the road that leads into Romagna, the one the fugitive Dante Alighieri travelled. The village stands where three valleys meet — the Mugello, the Valdisieve and the valley of San Godenzo — and its main street still keeps its seventeenth-century porticoes, arches carried on columns of square section.

The pieve of Santa Maria is Romanesque, of the twelfth century, with three naves and a mighty bell tower that was probably military to begin with; but its orientation has been reversed, because the doorway opens where the semicircular apse originally stood. It has been rebuilt twice after two earthquakes, that of 1542 and that of 1919, and the second did damage elsewhere too: Santa Maria ad Agnano, of Romanesque origin, came out of it almost destroyed and was rebuilt in a neo-medieval manner, and San Jacopo a Frascole, half ruined, was raised again in forms close to those it had before. At the beginning of the road to Forlì, instead, stands the oratory of Sant'Onofrio, of 1796, neoclassical, the work of Giuseppe Del Rosso: a sandstone portico with four cylindrical columns under a triangular pediment, and inside a dome on sixteen columns with Corinthian capitals. On the high altar the Madonna dello Spedale is venerated, and beside it there is an Immaculate Conception among saints by Lorenzo Lippi, of 1662.