San Lorenzo in Campo

San Lorenzo in Campo is built out of the pieces of a dead city. When Roman Suasa was abandoned, between the sixth and seventh centuries, the Benedictine monks who came from Sant'Apollinare in Classe built their abbey here on the remains of a temple of Adonis, and they built it with material from Suasa: the round arches rest on grey granite columns brought from Egypt. At first it was called San Lorenzo in Silvis, that is in the woods. Around the monastery people organised themselves into a stable settlement on the nearby promontory, which became a fortified borgo with walls, towers and a fortress at the top; and today, in the palace the Della Rovere had built below that fortress, is the Archaeological Museum of the Territory of Suasa. The city that gave the town its stones has come back inside the town, in a display case.

The abbey, raised to a basilica by Pius XII in 1943, held for centuries a rare privilege: it was vere nullius dioecesis, that is it depended on no bishop. It lost this on 23 July 1836, when by the bull Bonum Pastorem Gregory XVI detached San Lorenzo in Campo and the neighbouring villages from the abbey and joined them to the diocese of Pergola: the abbey remained one in name, but with no jurisdiction. In the sixteenth century the castle had passed to the Della Rovere, and the palace was built by Giulio della Rovere, ordained cardinal at the age of fourteen. In 1797, when the French revolutionary troops arrived, there was a clash at Ponte Rotto involving two thousand soldiers, and the French, although more numerous, got the worst of it. As for the coat of arms, its oldest image is carved on the architrave of the archive of the old town hall, with the inscription «ARCHIVIVM AB ANNO 1643»; during the fascist period the chief of the Lictor was added to it, and removed in 1943.