Cagli

In the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, at Urbino, hangs the famous panel everyone calls the Ideal City, attributed to Luciano Laurana on a design by Leon Battista Alberti. In the background one sees a landscape element whose profile is so characterised that it does not look imaginary, and according to Bresciani Alvarez and Filippini that profile matches the plateau of Monte Petrano, at the foot of which Cagli still stands today with its square; to this is added that the setting back of some buildings on the right side of the panel corresponds to a street that really exists here. If they are right, the most celebrated image of the perfect Renaissance city is the portrait of this town. Cagli does have a claim, for that matter: after the Ghibellines set fire to the Palazzo del Comune in 1287 and the city partly burned, the settlement was brought down from the slopes of Monte Petrano and rebuilt, on the ninth of February 1289, on the plateau below, to a plan of wide streets laid out in an orthogonal grid which Maddalena Scoccianti attributes to Arnolfo di Cambio. Pope Nicholas the Fourth renamed it Sant'Angelo Papale, but in time the ancient name came back and prevailed even in official documents.

How much it counted for, the figures tell. Cagli was Cale, on the Flaminia, a hundred and forty-seven miles from Rome: it appears in the Tabula Peutingeriana and in the itinerary of the pilgrims who went from Bordeaux to the Holy Land, and in the fourth century Servius, commenting on the Aeneid, had to explain that this Cale was not the Cales of Campania, adding that another existed in Galicia. The free comune born in the twelfth century subdued more than fifty castles, driving out the rural nobility and taking on the abbots, and the source notes that its militias carried their weapons right inside the cloisters of the powerful abbeys. A register of the taxes paid to the Church in 1312 counts one thousand five hundred and twenty-eight families at Cagli, and in 1357 the Constitutiones Aegidianae list it among the nine great cities of the Marca. In the limestone rocks of the mountains round about, laid down some one hundred and seventy-five million years ago, an ammonite was finally found that took its name from the town: Cagliceras, the horn of Cagli.