San Giovanni in Marignano

This is a town built to defend its own grain. The settlement came down from the hills into the plain in the second half of the thirteenth century, when the Cassinese Benedictines of Ravenna drained the land near the Ventena and planted wheat, vines and olives. Between 1438 and 1442 Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta gave it a ring of walls with six towers and two gate-towers, each with its own drawbridge. What those walls protected, however, lay underground: the grain pits. Every landowner had his own. In the fifteenth century more than two hundred are recorded, and in the nineteenth the municipal archive counted a hundred and twenty-eight of them along the main street alone; some can still be seen.

The name joins two things: the church of San Giovanni Battista in Castelvecchio, the first nucleus of the settlement, and the nearby fundus Mariniani, a late Roman farm whose owner was presumably a Marinus. The town held out against Piccinino's siege in 1443, passed to Venice in 1504, to the dukes of Urbino in 1508 and then to the Papal State until 1859. At the end of the nineteenth century Cattolica broke away, and with the separation two economies parted as well: the sea and then tourism on one side, farming and then industry on this one. The calendar, though, still follows the harvest: here Christmas begins with the fair of Santa Lucia in December, and the summer solstice is marked by the Night of the Witches.