Novafeltria

This comune has changed its name, changed its region, and before the twentieth century did not exist at all: it was created in 1907 out of some hamlets detached from the comune of Talamello. Until 1941 it was called Mercatino Marecchia, because it was a centre of trade and fairs — the big fairs were held in August — and because that is exactly what it was: a market without walls, an open meeting place, planted where the roads to San Leo, Talamello and Sant'Agata Feltria cross. Then it took the name Novafeltria, in which Feltria states its belonging to the Montefeltro. And finally, on the seventeenth and eighteenth of December 2006, the inhabitants voted: out of a little over six thousand entitled, more than four thousand voted, and eighty-two per cent chose to leave the province of Pesaro e Urbino, in the Marche, for that of Rimini, in Emilia-Romagna. The transfer took place on the fifteenth of August 2009, together with six other comuni of the Alta Valmarecchia. The municipal territory, moreover, includes an exclave as well: the hamlets of Secchiano and Uffogliano, wedged in between four different comuni.

At Perticara, an old mining centre inside the territory, there is a museum called Sulphur which documents the centuries of sulphur extraction, with finds ranging from the Bronze Age to the Umbrians, the Etruscans and the Romans. The railway that from 1922 to 1960 linked the town to Rimini was built above all to bring that sulphur down; it reached the station from Perticara along a cableway six kilometres long. The town hall, instead, is the sumptuous villa the counts Segni of Bologna had built here. And the local dialect says in its own way the same thing the referendum said: the speech of Mercatino has accepted the northern voicing only in part, so that alongside amiga, bug, fradël and röṡa there remain chëpra, crócia, fuc, tajèt and vétri. A way of speaking that stopped half-way across the line.