Fermignano

That the battle of the Metaurus of 207 before Christ was fought here is an old idea, and somebody wanted to prove it at all costs. The humanist Flavio Biondo linked the place name Monte Asdrualdo to the name of Hasdrubal, who died in that battle; the poet Bernardino Baldi then maintained that the Carthaginian commander's tomb stood on Monte d'Elce; and to Sebastiano Macci are perhaps attributable two false inscriptions, found in the area, which would have confirmed that the clash took place at Fermignano itself. The village's name has had the same treatment: it has been derived from a founder, one Mamurra Fermiano, an engineer in Caesar's service in Gaul, who was supposed to have designed the bridge. In fact it is a predial toponym and points to a Latin landowner, Firmidius — and of that man we even know two people he freed: at the end of the sixteenth century a funerary inscription was found near here naming Philonicus and Chelidon, evidently of eastern origin, perhaps husband and wife, freed by a Caius Firmidius. A Ravenna papyrus of the sixth century still speaks of a massa firmidiana in the territory of Urbino.

To become a village, though, took time. In 1338 a document records the election of the sindaci of the Villa di Fermignano, which was made of isolated buildings and farmhouses: a real settlement did not yet exist. It was founded by count Antonio di Montefeltro, grandfather of duke Federico, who at the end of the fourteenth century had the castle raised; on the nineteenth of December 1407 the Arengo of the village met, and forty-five people came. The year after, beside the tower, the paper mill was built: the second in the Marche after that of Fabriano. Here Donato Bramante was born. In 1607 duke Francesco Maria the Second, accepting the inhabitants' requests, granted partial autonomy, with a council of twenty-four people who every six months chose three of them as priors. Real autonomy from the city of Urbino took much longer: at the beginning of the nineteenth century the people of Fermignano asked pope Pius the Seventh for it, and after a struggle lasting twenty years against the opposition of the Urbinati the castle became a comune in 1818. Not even the territory is all in one piece: there is an exclave, the Pagino with Villa del Furlo, wedged between four other comuni.