San Costanzo

San Costanzo carries the name of a saint, and it is a hagiotoponym that would go back to the Byzantine early Middle Ages: in this territory there was certainly a small chapel or a field altar dedicated to the bishop Costanzo, martyred on the twenty-ninth of January of the year 175, and out of that cult came the name of the place, as happened constantly at the time. The relic of the patron is still in the collegiate church — particles of the martyr's arm, inside a gilded wooden urn with crystals, tied with a red silk cord and sealed by the bishop — and its presence is attested by a document in the bishop's archive of Fano as early as 1734. The first fortifications were raised around the sixth century, after the devastating Gothic-Byzantine war and before the Lombards came, when the people of the coastal areas were going up into the hills because up there one could be defended. In 1283 San Costanzo was one of the castles that made up the comitato of Fano. And from 1349 there survives a line of accounts: we gave and paid Cello di Chompangniuccio, on the twenty-second of August, because he was sent to Sanghostanzo as captain when the castle burned, to have it mended — fifteen lire. It was not war: that year the village was involved in no military action at all.

In 1429 Galeotto Roberto Malatesta consented to the rebuilding of the ruined walls, which had suffered from the rebellions and reconquests of the years before, and those works in all probability gave the scarped perimeter the shape that has come down to us. It was long supposed that Francesco di Giorgio Martini had had a hand in the fortification, in the years when the fief belonged to Giovanni Della Rovere; but the hypothesis is supported by no historical source, and certain documents found in the bishop's archive of Fano have closed the question: the tower-and-church complex was built only from 1570, about seventy years after the Sienese architect's death. The element on which the attribution rested did not yet exist at the time of the supposed work. What war did not do to these walls, the twentieth century did: letters kept in the parish archive say that in 1899 the towers and most of the circuit still kept their primitive form, and in the first half of the last century almost all of it — two towers and the northern gate included — was worked over so radically that the architecture and the original function were altogether lost. Only the north-western tower was spared, and a short stretch of wall beside it.