Riserva Naturale Bosco della Frattona

A short walk from Parco Tozzoni, the Bosco della Frattona preserves a piece of Imola's oldest landscape: a protected regional reserve of oak woodland on the marine yellow sands, where Giuseppe Scarabelli found fossils and Palaeolithic tools from 1840 onward and where woodpeckers and bats now headline the wildlife.

Why it matters

The Riserva Naturale Orientata Bosco della Frattona, established in 1984, protects one of the most scientifically loaded woods in Emilia-Romagna. Its trees root in the sabbie di Imola, the yellow marine sands laid down about a million years ago along the margin of the rising Apennines, which have yielded fossils of animals and plants and made the wood a named site in the history of Italian geology. From 1840 the Imola geologist Giuseppe Scarabelli — an antesignano of the discipline, in the regional authority's words — explored these sands and recovered remains of large land mammals together with Lower Palaeolithic stone tools, finds now conserved in the Imola museum that bears his name. Long held by bishops and then by noble families who preserved the cover, the wood passed to the comune and today stands as a regional reserve, part of the Natura 2000 site IT4050004.

What to notice

The reserve's landscape tells two layered stories. The first is geological: the sandy substrate, the colour of the soils, and the interpretive signs that explain how a sea floor became a hillside. The second is botanical: the regional account describes a well-stratified mesophilic mixed oak wood, dominated by downy oak and sessile oak with Turkey oak, field maple, manna ash and hornbeams, with butcher's broom thick in the understorey and old chestnuts from historic planting still standing; the edges carry the robinia of abandoned farmland. In spring, flowering ground flora adds a seasonal layer to the woodland. Woodpeckers and bats are among the fauna the regional authority highlights; the Rio Correcchio runs near the lower woodland, close to Parco Tozzoni.

Context and history

The reserve's protection has two anchors. The cultural one is Scarabelli's research: from 1840 his surveys of the Frattona's sands produced the fossil mammals and Lower Palaeolithic artefacts that helped fix the antiquity of human presence in the Imola area, and the connection between wood and museum remains the site's defining scientific story. The institutional one is regional law: the reserve was created in 1984 as an oriented nature reserve — a protected area where farming and forestry interventions are excluded unless compatible with conserving the natural environments — and it now corresponds to the Natura 2000 site IT4050004. Management rests with Ente di gestione per i Parchi e la Biodiversità – Romagna, in agreement with the Comune di Imola. The wood's ownership history — bishops, then noble families until well into the twentieth century, then the comune — explains how a forest this close to town survived at all.