Cappelletta del Duca, Chapel in Tre Torri - Medolla (MO)

The Cappelletta del Duca is a cylindrical votive oratory with a dome covered in lead sheets, standing inside a two-lane roundabout about 86 metres in diameter. It lies at the junction of the SS12 Abetone and Brennero road and the SP5 Cavezzo-Camposanto road, on the border between Medolla and San Prospero.

On 16 November 1848, Luigi Rizzati, a Mazzinian pharmacy student, fired a rifle at Duke Francesco V near the Tre Torri inn in Villafranca di Medolla and missed. The duke had the attacker arrested and sentenced to ten years, judging him mentally unstable. Francesco V commissioned this votive chapel in thanks; construction dragged on and was still unfinished and unconsecrated in 1859.

The chapel takes its name from Duke Francesco V, who had it built as a votive offering after surviving an assassination attempt on 16 November 1848. The would-be assassin, Luigi Rizzati, a pharmacy student from the University of Modena, was sentenced to ten years in prison because the duke considered him mentally unstable.

The chapel sits at a roundabout opened in 2009 that greatly improved safety at this once-dangerous road junction. The site is easy to reach on foot when arriving from nearby parking areas or local roads.

On 13 May 1898 the Medolla municipal administration handed the chapel to the civil engineering office, which passed it to ANAS as a tool store. The roundabout around it was only inaugurated on 8 April 2009, after a traffic light had been activated in September 2002 at what was then the busiest junction of the lower Modena plain, with 13,833 vehicles a day in 2006.