Rocchetta Mattei

A fortified site held this spur above the meeting of the Reno and the eastern Limentra long before the Rocchetta. The Rocca di Savignano stood near the Bolognese-Pistoiese border, where trans-Apennine routes, bridges and jurisdictions converged; by the 12th century its corte, with castle, mill and bridge, belonged in part to the Benedictine abbey of San Salvatore della Fontana Taona. A record of 1235 describes a fortress with a tower joined by a passage to a walled enclosure sheltering several houses, then under the Alberti counts.

As the abbey declined, Bologna tightened its grip on the valley: in 1293 the commune took Savignano and destroyed it almost completely, then rebuilt walls fit for a garrison. With the defensive line pushed forward and valley-floor towns such as Vergato and Porretta rising, the fortress lost its purpose, and by the late 18th century it was a ruin.

Cesare Mattei, born in Bologna in 1809 into a wealthy family of Ferrarese origin, helped found the Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna in 1837 and in 1847 was made a count by Pius IX, with his brother Giuseppe, after the pair gave their holdings on the Magnavacca canal near Comacchio to the Papal States.

His mother's death and his disillusionment with politics after 1848 turned him from public life towards a therapeutic system of his own, elettromeopatia. In 1850 he bought the land where the ruins of Savignano still stood, and on 5 November, before a handful of friends, he laid the first stone of what he called affectionately the Rocchetta, the little fortress.

Mattei directed the work himself, meaning at first to recreate a medieval castle, and never stopped: towers, terraces, loggias and interiors were added campaign after campaign in shifting styles, the main phase finished only in 1875. No professional architect presided; craftsmen and local master builders, among them the Bolognese scenographer Giulio Cesare Ferrari, turned his ideas into built form.

Much of the richness is deliberate illusion, cheap materials painted to pass for marble and carved wood; the genuinely old probably came from suppressed Bolognese churches, including a relief of the condottiero Niccolò Ludovisi attributed to Jacopo della Quercia. The Moorish motifs came from the Alhambra and Córdoba by way of Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament and the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Electrohomeopathy combined medicated granules with liquids Mattei called electric fluids, drawn from plants by a secret process; disease, he held, was an imbalance of positive and negative electric forces his remedies could restore, cancer included. Physicians attacked the claims as baseless and the preparations as secret, but the trade spread: 26 recognised depots beyond Bologna's in 1881, 107 by 1884, and 266 worldwide by 1914 under Venturoli. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's devil says Count Mattei's drops cured his rheumatism.

Mattei settled at the Rocchetta permanently in 1859 and lived there as a medieval lord might, with a small court of collaborators, patients and a jester; as numbers grew, lodging spread into the villini climatici of the nearby Borgo dell'Archetta. Promotional literature and local tradition place Ludwig of Bavaria, Tsar Alexander II, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Rossini among those received or treated here; the Prince of Piedmont's visit in 1925 was official.

Failed ventures by Mattei's nephew Luigi brought an inheritance crisis in 1887-88 that sent family property to auction and put the Rocchetta at risk. Mattei disinherited him and in 1888 adopted his collaborator Mario Venturoli, who took castle, business and the name Mario Venturoli Mattei when the count died in 1896. Venturoli added Liberty interiors and had the count's ceramic sarcophagus made by the Minghetti works to his testamentary instructions. Production of the original remedies in Bologna continued until the laboratories closed in 1968.

German troops occupied the castle in the Second World War, damaging the interiors and carrying off furnishings; the last heir, Iris Boriani, offered it free to the city of Bologna, which refused. Primo Stefanelli bought it in 1959 and ran it as a tourist attraction with hotel and restaurant until it closed to the public in the late 1980s. A committee formed in 1997 to save it, ringing the walls with a human chain; Fondazione Carisbo acquired it in 2005 and spent some seven years on structures, roofs and decoration. It reopened on 9 August 2015, and in 2024 work began on the Arab-Moorish wing, reckoned the oldest part and the one Mattei first lived in.