Via Romea Nonantolana

The Abbey of Nonantola, founded in 752 AD by Anselm, Duke of Cividale, after his renunciation of secular power, was not merely a Benedictine monastic centre: it became one of the most active nodes in the cultural and religious network of the early medieval Po Valley, a point of reference for pilgrims, merchants and armies crossing the plain towards Rome. It is from that place, in the province of Modena, that the Via Romea Nonantolana takes its name and origin — an itinerary that follows the valley of the river Panaro upstream to the Apennine ridge between Tuscany and Emilia, at the Passo della Croce Arcana.

The route runs for roughly two hundred kilometres divided into ten stages, with a twin structure — an eastern and a western branch — that converges at Fanano before tackling the climb towards the border with Tuscany. This layout reflects the logic of medieval routes, designed to spread the flow of travellers across several valleys, gathering along the way parish churches, castles and villages that still bear legible traces of that function of transit and hospitality. The route is classified as linear and can be walked in full or in sections.

Compared with the Via Francigena, with which it shares its period of greatest use and its final destination, the Romea Nonantolana has kept a lower profile and, as a result, sees fewer travellers. The rural and mountain territories it crosses — the middle and upper Panaro valley, the slopes of the Modena Apennines — have largely remained untouched by large-scale organised tourism. This has preserved a continuity of landscape and settlement that elsewhere has been lost or reconstructed after the fact.

The historical period in which the route saw its greatest vitality coincides with the centuries when the Italian peninsula was crossed by a dense network of roads linking northern Europe to Rome: a widespread system that served devotion, trade and politics alike. The Via Romea Nonantolana fits into that network as a connecting itinerary between the Po Valley and the Apennine passes, at a time when Nonantola was influential enough to shape the flow of movement across the whole area.

Today the path is waymarked and walkable, with a local hospitality network supported by operators from the Modena lowlands and mountains. Those who walk it encounter a landscape that changes gradually — from the open plain around Nonantola, through the hill belt where the first medieval castles appear, to the dense vegetation and thin air of the Apennines. The Passo della Croce Arcana, the route's endpoint, marks the physical and historical border between two regions, and closes a journey whose coherence lies not in the exceptional nature of individual monuments, but in the continuity of the territory that holds them together.