Ostra

The town was called Montalboddo until 1881, when a royal decree granted the citizens' request and changed its name to Ostra. Ostra was a Roman municipium, destroyed — so the legend says — by Alaric's Visigoths in 410; the survivors are supposed to have taken refuge on a nearby hill belonging to a fellow citizen of theirs named Bodio, and from that, Monte Bodio. The change of name was decided precisely in order to support the direct descent of this town from that city. Only there are no documents for it: the ruins of Roman Ostra lie in the territory of another comune, Ostra Vetere, and the name Monte Bodio appears for the first time in 1194.

That year, 1194, is the birth of the comune: it came by a pact signed at Argenta before the archbishop of Ravenna, who gave Montalboddo its statutes — and at the same time confirmed that the town was his. The inhabitants freed themselves from Ravenna after two years of revolt; then they were sacked and passed under Jesi, and after that came the lords, one after another, so many that in 1399 the Malatesta of Rimini took the town and their commander died beneath its walls. In 1454 the citizens had had enough: they drove out the family that ruled them, gave themselves to the Church and pulled down the rocca of the castle, so that no lord should ever again take it into his head to conquer it. The wars had cost the town about a third of its people. Two centuries later a written peace was needed, in 1574, between the noble families that were feuding at home.