Verucchio

The name comes from the Latin verruculus, the little wart in the figurative sense of a rise, and the rise is the spur that commands the Marecchia valley. Excavations begun at the end of the nineteenth century and resumed in the nineteen-seventies and in two thousand and five have yielded more than six hundred burials from between the tenth and the seventh century before Christ, Villanovan, that is from the earliest phase of Etruscan civilisation, with an extraordinary quantity of amber: Greek merchants came here for the fossil resin that arrived from the Baltic, until that role passed to Spina and to Adria. The soil has preserved for almost three thousand years things that normally do not survive: wooden thrones and cloaks of coloured wool.

The diploma by which Otto I is supposed to have given Verucchio to the counts of Carpegna in 962 has turned out to be a forgery; the castrum first appears in 1114. In 1295 Malatesta da Verucchio, the man Dante calls the old mastiff, seized Rimini and began his family's lordship, which lost the rocca del Sasso in 1462, after a long siege by Federico da Montefeltro, through the treachery of the castellan. The town then passed from hand to hand until 1516, when Leo X granted it in fief to Giovanni Maria l'Alemanno, a converted Jew of German origin and an excellent lute player at the papal court, on whom he had already bestowed the Medici name and arms; with a bull of 1518 the same pope made Verucchio a city, taking it out of Rimini's jurisdiction. The comune also includes Pieve Corena, which is cut off from it by the State of San Marino.