Originally simply Grizzana, it received the "Morandi" in 1985, as an honorarium to the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, who died in 1964. Morandi rarely travelled from his home and studio in Bologna, but visited Grizzana every year from 1913 for a summer holiday period, and many of his landscape paintings are of the town and its immediate surrounds. The town also hosts a centre for documentation about him (Centro di documentazione Giorgio Morandi) which has a collection of documents on the painter and local history.