Centres mineurs et routes en Émilie-Romagne La « petite Cassia » et l’abbaye de Santa-Maria-in-Strada*

At the beginning of the 17th century, Giovanni Antonio Magini depicted only one road for the whole peninsula in the 60 papers of his atlas dedicated to Italy: the Via Aemilia. It reveals the exceptional nature of this road axis, which influenced the historical and political evolution of this region and generated the territory enough to give it its own name, with a fundamental long-standing identity value. Thus, in order to analyze the issue of the minor medieval roads and the one of the relationship between the major and the minor centers, it is necessary to consider the centrality of this road – which is a material and concrete, symbolic and identity-making centrality – and its role in identifying alternative road axes. In the Middle Ages, in fact, a complex and smooth reality arose around the Via Aemilia, which can be defined a “road area”. This is a set of complementary and alternative paths always connected to the route of the strada maior, which is a permanent structure that influenced the political, cultural and economic evolution of the area to which it gave its name, starting from the Roman territorial planning. This essay aims to analyze the relationship between this permanent structure and the minor roads in Emilia Romagna, in a well-defined area near Bologna.