Colli al Metauro

There is a building here from which the sky has been watched for more than eight centuries. The villa del Balì was built beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Martin that already existed before the year one thousand, and from 1165 it belonged to the bishop of Fano, who fitted it with four turrets for observing the vault of heaven. Its present appearance, with the façade marked out by stone-framed windows and the double-ramp staircase rising to the piano nobile, is of the eighteenth century, the result of successive reworkings. Inside today there is one of the most important planetaria in Italy, together with an interactive museum with more than thirty fixed stations where natural phenomena can be tried out: four turrets of a medieval bishop and a hall where the stars are projected, in the same place and for the same reason.

The comune is recent: it came into being on the first of January 2017 from the merger of Montemaggiore al Metauro, Saltara and Serrungarina, and it is a scattered comune that put its seat at Calcinelli, that is in a hamlet which had never been a comune at all. The coat of arms adds up the three pieces: the six-peaked mount of Montemaggiore, the gold star of Serrungarina and the dragon of Saltara. At Saltara the castle walls survive, and a porticoed covered street that has housed the market by concession of the Malatesta since 1489, and the dragon of the arms turns up again on the civic tower, in fragments of the Malatesta blazon. At Montemaggiore, in a former church, there is a museum devoted to the morning of the twenty-fifth of August 1944, when Winston Churchill climbed up to the castle together with general Alexander to look down on the troops drawn up in the Metauro valley.