Gatteo

The name is one of those that record a career. It began as a land name, the fundus Catei of an ancient owner, but the form we read was built up in the Middle Ages step by step with the growth of the settlement: in 1311 the documents write Tumba Ghatei, that is a farmstead with a fortified house; in 1358 the place is already a Commune; in 1371 it becomes a Castrum. The land had been won back from the marshes from the ninth century onwards by the church of Ravenna and by the monasteries, and at the end of the tenth century the Aggero Gatthei was raised here, a quadrilateral of palisades and ditches that in time became a castle. The arms with the cat, on the other hand, are attributed to Erasmo da Narni known as Gattamelata, who really did pass through between 1431 and 1432: but the attribution is mistaken, and the source says so.

The strangest page is from 1610, when the council of the community divided the territory into eleven quarters: each had a quarter head drawn by lot among the residents of a certain standing, and the office lasted four months. The other dates are just as precise: in 1452 pope Nicholas the Fifth granted the territory in fief to the counts Guidi di Bagno, and on the nineteenth of August of the same year the boundaries with Cesena were fixed; the oratory of San Rocco was built in 1484 after the plagues, and its frescoes still show Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows, because the contagion was believed to strike like an arrow. On the first of August 1849 Garibaldi crossed these fields with more than two hundred men on his way to Cesenatico, and Gatteo became an independent comune in 1860.