At the foot of Monte Cimone, Fanano has kept a medieval old town of narrow lanes, carved doorways and houses of grey sandstone, the stone that has been quarried and worked here for centuries. The village holds the Orange Flag of the Touring Club Italiano.
Its religious heart is the parish church of San Silvestro, which tradition links to Saint Anselm, the Lombard duke who founded a monastic community here in the mid-8th century, before the abbey of Nonantola. The present building was rebuilt in 1612 after a fire, but it still has carved Romanesque capitals in the crypt and apse, a 14th-century fresco of the Madonna and Child and a 16th-century baptismal font.
Walking around, you come across the works of the Stone Sculpture Symposium, started in 1983: more than 250 sculptures, from fountains and benches to reliefs on house fronts, scattered around the centre, the outlying hamlets and the Lido area, turning the village into an open-air museum. Above many doorways you will notice the marcolfe, faces carved in stone to keep evil spirits away.