Pieve del Tho Museum

The Pieve di San Giovanni in Ottavo (called Pieve del Tho) is encountered just over a kilometer from Brisighella. It is the oldest parish church built in the Lamone Valley.
An open staircase at the beginning of the right aisle leads to the archaeological path under the present floor level. Excavations conducted around and shortly after the mid-20th century have
revealed several archaeological traces and materials dating between the Roman Age and the Middle Ages. These are elements chronologically earlier than the primitive Christian worship building unearthed at the di
below the present apse, used as the crypt of the church erected in the Romanesque period (late 11th – early 12th centuries). The well with drainage found under the nave, variously
interpreted by some as a small oven or furnace and by others as a “spa treatment cell,” has recently been identified as a bell casting pit.
An equipped tour with explanatory panels, created in the crypt and adjoining underground rooms, offers an organized display of archaeological artifacts dating from the age
Roman and Medieval-Renaissance ages: manubriate bricks, branded bricks, bricks with animal footprints, pavement hexagonettes, tableware and fire pottery, glass fragments,
some large terracotta doli marked with progressive numbering graffitied on the rim, several fictile and stone elements of funerary origin, including the reconstruction of a cappuccina tomb, or
pertaining to the earliest phase of the parish (transepts, panels, plutei, capitals, gray marble urn for the ashes of the martyr St. Claro).

Stripped materials reused or incorporated into architectural structures and wall faces include fragments of epigraphs, seven partly reworked capitals (1st cent. BCE to V-VI
sec. A.D.), one of which was converted into a holy water stoup, some column bases, a column in pink Verona marble, and eight in oriental granite: of notable importance is the one that reemploys
a milestone commemorating the emperors Valens, Gratian, and Valentinian II, generally related to the route of the Via Aemilia, into which the Via Faentina precisely entered.
Still other artifacts, mostly from the Roman period, are walled in or attached to the walls at various points in the church complex. Worthy of mention among these are the lusory table engraved on brick, a
Greek marble transenna, an olive press, several fragments of funerary epigraphs.

Address: Provincial Road 302 R Brisighellese-Ravennate, 48013 Brisighella RA