Montescudo-Monte Colombo

On 6 February 1797 a deputation from Montescudo went down to Rimini to pay its respects to general Bonaparte; and when the Cisalpine Republic was set up the year after, Napoleon remembered the place and raised it to the third canton of the department of the Rubicone. When he fell, the papal government took the territory back and, precisely because of the liberal sentiments it had shown, reduced it to a plain comune with nothing under it. Three years later it gave the rank back. Montescudo — Montescuotolo, at the time — had been given by an emperor to the counts of Carpegna in the tenth century; and in 1722 half the village was destroyed by a landslide.

Between the twelve hundreds and the fourteen hundreds this land was fought over, sometimes in bloody battles, by the Malatesta and the Montefeltro: the towers and the rocche that still fill the valleys of the Marecchia and the Conca come from exactly that, because every village and every useful point had to be fortified, the mills and the fords and the bridges of the valley floor as much as the heights. In September 1944 the fighting destroyed most of both Montescudo and Monte Colombo, and they were rebuilt once the war was over. On 1 January 2016 the two became a single comune. Their centres touch and make one built-up area, but they have been kept distinct, and the statute set up a municipio in each of the two old territories; the seat went to Monte Colombo, and the new arms put the two old ones together.