Frassinoro

Frassinoro stood on the Via Bibulca in the upper Modenese Apennines, between the valleys of the Dolo and Dragone. Its Benedictine abbey, founded in 1071 by Beatrice of Lorraine and associated with her daughter Matilda of Canossa, inherited a chapel and a hospice serving travellers between Emilia and Tuscany. Endowments of twelve estates gave the monastery a territorial influence far beyond the buildings themselves.

By the fourteenth century that power was already diminished. Conflict with the commune of Modena had forced the monks to surrender their temporal jurisdiction in 1261; during the fifteenth century the abbey buildings fell into decay. Pope Sixtus V finally suppressed the institution in 1585. Worship nevertheless continued at Santa Maria and San Claudio, which became a parish church in the seventeenth century. Stones and carved fragments from the older monastery were reused in its fabric, while a medieval enamelled Eucharistic dove from Limoges remained among its treasures. The settlement thus retained the religious centre of a former monastic lordship beside a mountain crossing that had long joined the two sides of the Apennines.