Cantiano

The village lies at the foot of the Catria massif, the highest peak in the province, among centuries-old beech woods: the one at Tecchie has been a public park since 1986. The rocks of these mountains are of marine origin and full of fossils, and one of those fossils went far. In the sixteenth century Michele Mercati, naturalist and papal archiater, was a guest here of father Agostino Manni, who was from Cantiano and got him some ammonites of the so-called Rosso Ammonitico, gathered in the Burano valley between Cagli and Cantiano. Mercati had them drawn by the German engraver Anton Eisenhoit for his Metalloteca Vaticana, finished in 1574 and published only in 1717, where one of them appears as «the stone horn of Ammon from the gorges of Cantiano»: palaeontologists today call it Mercaticeras, that is Mercati's horn.

On the via Flaminia, a little lower down, stood Luceoli, a Roman municipium and later a stronghold of the Byzantine corridor, destroyed for good in 1137 by the emperor Lothair II; the survivors fell back on the two fortified hills just to the north, and from there Cantiano begins. The name comes perhaps from Cante Gabrielli, of the family from Gubbio that in the tenth century had obtained from the pope a number of castles, among them that of Luceoli, renamed precisely Cantiano. On the hill of Colmatrano stood a tower twenty-four metres high, of which the foundations remain; on the other one the castle, and joining the two hills a circuit of walls ten metres thick, which in effect barred the road to Rome. Before returning around 1300 under Gubbio, Cantiano knew the experience of the Libera Università: thanks to the donations of count Gualteruzio Bonaccorsi the community became owner and administrator of the common goods, and part of what they yielded went to pay the salary of the doctor and of the schoolmaster, so that their services should be free for everybody.