Fossombrone

In July 1765 an enormous flood carried away the five-arched bridge that crossed the Metauro. Rebuilding it took eleven years of hesitation — uncertainty over the designs, uncertainty over where to put it, difficulty in finding the money — and the works began only in 1776, to a design by the Roman architect Filippo Marchionni: a single humpbacked arch, on the model of the devil's bridges of medieval tradition. Once the bridge was finished, however, the authorities of the day did not dare have the wooden centring taken away, for fear the whole thing would come down; the one who dismantled it was a carpenter, on the promise that he could keep all the timber. That it was well built is proved by what happened in 1944: the retreating German troops mined it, and the first two charges blew away only the side parapets — to bring the arch down a third was needed. After the war it was rebuilt where it was and as it was.

The name comes from Forum Sempronii, the Roman centre linked to the consul Publius Sempronius Sophus, which however stood further east than here, at San Martino del Piano, a hundred and sixty-four miles from Rome; Pliny the Elder calls its inhabitants the Forosempronienses. The Goths of Alaric devastated it as they came down towards Rome, and after the twenty years of the Gothic war the survivors built the new settlement on the hill that overlooks the valley, where it still is. To defend it from the designs of the neighbours, the Este went so far as to subinfeudate the city to a bishop; then the Malatesta fortified it, and of their rocca there remain the ruins with the corner towers, the keep and the characteristic pentagonal plan due to Francesco di Giorgio Martini. In 1444 Galeazzo Malatesta sold it to Federico da Montefeltro, and under him the city prospered on wool, paper and silk. His son Guidobaldo found it so agreeable, for the pleasantness of the place and the healthy climate, that he lived here almost always and here he died. In 1989, finally, an excavation by the University of Urbino at Calmazzo brought to light the funerary enclosure of the Cissonia family.