Montecalvo in Foglia

Montecalvo was for centuries a frontier village, and on its arms it has a tower that says so: the Torre Cotogna, a lone medieval tower on the top of a rounded hill. In Roman times it was the only territory of Urbino on the left bank of the Foglia; then, with the end of the empire, people went up high and the castles of the valley were born. The Byzantines strengthened Monte Calvo and filled the valley with towers, to defend the via Flaminia to the south and the Po plain and Ravenna to the north. When in 1226 the county of Urbino went to the Montefeltro, the castle found itself one of their posts beyond the river, surrounded by lands of the Malatesta of Rimini, and for two and a half centuries it was the scene of battles: the best known is the one called of the Pieve, in 1446, when Francesco Sforza, ally of the Montefeltro, camped here and challenged the men of Rimini who were in the castle of Tavoleto. Sforza won, but the Rimini men shut themselves in the castle and he had to stay camped at Monte Calvo for weeks.

The finest story, though, is that of a bell. On the wooden belfry of the old church of San Nicolò, cited in a document of 1290, there was a bell cast by the Venetian master Manfredino; in 1838 it was moved to the bell-gable built on top of the castle tower. In the summer of 1944 the English air force razed the village, which lay on the Gothic Line: the medieval church, the old houses, the church of San Giorgio and the Renaissance farmstead of the Odasi were lost. The bell-gable, however, stayed standing on its left side, and the bell was saved. In 1952 it was taken to the parish of Trasanni, and in 1976 its traces were lost. It has been found again in the store of the diocesan museum of Urbino and brought home in 2022: it is of the thirteenth century, and one of the oldest in Italy.