Sassoferrato

In this valley it was twice decided who was to rule Italy. The first time in July 295 BC, at Sentinum: it was the decisive clash of the Third Samnite War, the one the Romans called the battle of the nations, between the army of the Republic led by the consuls Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus and Publius Decius Mus and the Italic coalition of Samnites, Gauls, Etruscans and Umbrians commanded by Gellius Egnatius. The Romans won, and Decius Mus died there after performing the rite of the devotio, that is after devoting himself to the gods below together with the enemy army. The second time was about eight hundred and fifty years later, in July 552, a few kilometres further north, at the foot of Monte Strega: the Byzantines of Narses, sent by Justinian to take Italy back, against the Goths of Totila, who was gravely wounded there and died fleeing into Umbria. Of that second battle the peasants of the district, ploughing, have gone on turning up the pieces: weapons, horse harness, fragments of armour.

The name of this town became the surname of two people the world knows: Bartolo da Sassoferrato, the jurist, and the painter Giovanni Battista Salvi, whom everybody simply calls il Sassoferrato. The built-up area stands on two levels, the Borgo quarter lower down and the Castello quarter higher up, and inside the town three torrents meet a few metres from one another: the Sanguerone from the north, the Sentino from the west, the Marena from the south. In the church of San Francesco, of 1240 and built where the saint of Assisi is said to have preached, there is a painted Cross that is one of the highest things left by fourteenth-century Riminese painting in the Marche. And in the year 2000, while the bishop's palace was being restored, a punishment cell for clergy and seminarists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to light inside the building.