Pieve di San Giovanni in Ottavo (Pieve del Tho)

The Pieve di San Giovanni in Ottavo, the historic mother church of the Lamone valley, stands amid olive groves where the Roman road from Faenza reached its eighth mile. Its Romanesque structure remains clearly legible.

Why it matters

The name "in ottavo" refers to the eighth mile of the Via Faventina, the Roman route from Faenza towards Etruria recorded on the Peutinger Table. This was the valley's baptismal parish church, and a document of 909 already names it. Tradition attributes its founding to Galla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius, and tells of stone reused from a temple of Jupiter Ammon; archaeological dating places the building between the eighth and tenth centuries. It is among the early places of worship in the Romagna Apennine foothills.

What to notice

The three-aisled Romanesque interior has naves divided by round arches on columns of differing materials and sizes: eleven shafts of grey marble and one of Verona red, likely spolia from an earlier building. Outside, small hanging arches, flat lesenes and narrow single-light windows mark the nave walls. A Roman milestone in the church names four emperors of the late 370s. The high altar incorporates a stone frontal carved between the eighth and ninth centuries. A first-century AD Corinthian capital serves as a holy-water font; other objects include a seventeenth-century ceramic funerary plaque, fresco fragments from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and a second-century oil-press millstone.

Context and history

The pieve anchored the religious geography of the valley as a baptismal church with a college of priests, around which scattered Lamone chapels were organised. Its location at the road's eighth milestone connected it with movement and assembly in antiquity. The present basilica-plan building, with trussed roof and austere lines, belongs to an early medieval rebuilding tradition and appears in written records by 909. Over the centuries it accumulated reused Roman stones, early medieval carvings and later frescoes rather than undergoing a single wholesale reconstruction. Its parish primacy eventually passed to the Collegiata in Brisighella, but the old title Pieve del Tho—the Pieve of the Eighth—remains.