Dovadola

Immersed in the rolling hills of the Tuscany Romagna Apennine, Dovadola rises on a stretch of the Montone River that crosses both the entrance and the exit and is therefore called the city of the two fords.

It is a rural village tied to its traditions, Dovadola preserves the signs of the early settlements of the Celtic era and a burial place of valiant Gallic warriors. Roman domination left imperial tombs and coins, although it was established that the ancient castle was built by lombards between the 7th and 8th centuries.

It is a point of passage halfway between Romagna and Tuscany, which is a land of battles and conquest. The long list begins with the archbishops of Ravenna and embraces the counts Guidi of Modigliana, the Ordelaffi and the lords of Florence, with a disastrous invasion by Bartolomeo Colleoni and his troops who captured the fortress and razed the town.

Traces of medieval times and influences of Tuscan architecture harmoniously coexist in the historic centre, characterised by the powerful Roccaccia del Guidi (XII century) and an orthogonal crossroad of roads built in a natural loop between the bed of the river Montone and the fortress.

There is a centrally located amphitheater, which was used as a market until 1965, a courtyard market overlooks a curtain of stone houses surmounted by a tower erected in the 13th century by Count Guidi. Due to repeated invasions, only eight of the eleven castles erected in Dovadola stand, not all perfectly preserved.

Immersed in the rolling hills surrounding the valley, along the hiking and trekking paths, there are treasures of peasant culture and Christian religiosity. Among the two hundred and seventy rural houses scattered around we find the Palazzo Montaguto, an oratory and manor house, in the hamlet of San Ruffillo, where in the summer of 1849 Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Captain found shelter after the fall of the Roman Republic.

Not far from here is the parish of Sant'Andrea, inside which valuable frescoes are kept and, in a sarcophagus, the remains of Benedetta Bianchi Porro, declared venerable by the Catholic Church. The building dates back to the eleventh century, built on an old abbey founded by the Cluny monks

The Temple of Faith and Spirituality is a hermitage of Montepaolo, in a cave where St. Anthony of Padua stopped to pray in 1221.

Rural traditions survive in the Dovadola cuisine, famous for its succulent white truffle recipes, whose festival has been celebrated for more than thirty years on the third and fourth Sunday of October.