Regional Park of Gessi Bolognesi and Calanchi dell'Abbadessa

https://youtu.be/tPsNzDnHB8w The regional park of Gessi Bolognesi and Calanchi dell'Abbadessa is a protected natural area that develops on the first slopes of the Bolognese hill. The park develops around important chalky outcrops that have given life to a karst complex of considerable interest. The park also embraces the Abbadessa badlands, a formation that gives the landscape an aspect of severe beauty. The existence of communities dedicated to hunting and gathering in the area has been documented since the Palaeolithic period, and nuclei from the Bronze Age have been identified in the hamlets of Croara, Farneto, in the Calindri cave and in Castel de 'Britti. Many of the artifacts found are on display today at the "Luigi Donini" Museum of Prehistory in San Lazzaro. [2] The subsequent prevalence of the agricultural economy favored the concentration of settlements in the plain. Where the Quaderna stream crosses the Via Emilia, just outside the park, there was the Roman city of Claterna, one of the few in the region to have had no residential continuity from antiquity to the present day. Almost certainly of Etruscan origin, it developed during the Republican and above all Augustan age, when it was surrounded by a crown of suburban villas; the beautiful mosaic floors found during the excavations are now partly preserved in the Archaeological Civic Museum of Bologna and partly visible in situ in the Maggio locality. During the Middle Ages, the whole territory was characterized by small inhabited centers scattered over the hills, generally fortified and gathered around a castle or a parish church. The fortress of San Pietro di Ozzano, for example, originated from the inhabitants of Claterna who, after the destruction of the city in the 5th century, took refuge on the nearby hill. On the right side of the Idice, formerly in the municipality of San Lazzaro, stands Castel de 'Britti, an ancient fortified village at the mouth of the stream on the plain, in a dominant position on a chalk spur. Among the localities of the park it is the one with the most ancient memory, mentioned in an eighth century document as "Castro Gissaro, quod dicitur Britu". Belonged to Matilde di Canossa and then passed to Bologna, it was destroyed and rebuilt several times, testifying to its strategic importance. In the Settefonti area there is the Pieve di Pastino, already attested in the 11th century; decayed in the fifteenth century and survived only as an oratory, it was later transformed into a civil residence. Not far from the parish church, there was the female monastery of Santa Cristina, near the long ridge between the badlands known as the "Passo della Badessa". Of the monastery, demolished in 1769, only memory remains in the figure of the Abbess Lucia, later blessed Lucia da Settefonti. A romantic legend has it that Lucia, after her death, miraculously saved from imprisonment in the Holy Land a young crusader of the Bolognese nobility, Diatagora Fava, who used to go up the steep ridge to the church to catch a glimpse of it during religious services. The stocks that imprisoned the young man and Lucia's body are kept in the nearby church of Sant'Andrea. In the place where the monastery stood, a small pillar was erected in 1779, a gift from the canon Paolo Patrizio Fava Ghisilieri, then renovated in the 1920s by a descendant of him, Count Alessandro Fava Ghisilieri. Also in the chalky heights around the Croara there were fortified centers: a 1084 writing speaks of a castle "quod vocatur Corvaria"; near the sinkhole of Spipola, the small community of Miserazzano possessed a church and perhaps a fortified building, where the nineteenth-century villa of the Negri counts was built. [3] Finally, along via della Croara remains the church of the same name, which was once part of the 10th century abbey of Santa Cecilia. The regional park was established in 1988 on the initiative of the municipalities of San Lazzaro di Savena, Ozzano, Pianoro and Bologna.