Sant'Angelo in Vado stands over the ruins of Tifernum Mataurense, the Roman municipium whose name comes from tipher or tifia, a water plant that grows in marshy ground. The study of the city's plan, reconstructed from the excavations and from aerial photography, shows that it was square, with the cardo and decumanus crossing according to the castrum scheme. The war between Byzantines and Ostrogoths, in the sixth century, destroyed it completely; it was the Lombards who rebuilt the settlement over the ruins, by then almost entirely covered by alluvial soil, and dedicated it to the archangel Michael — hence Sant'Angelo. The «in Vado» came later, and it has two explanations: either it refers to the fact that to pass from one to the other of the two parts of the town spread along the banks one had to ford (guadare) the Metauro, or it refers to guado, woad, the plant that grows abundantly along the river and from which a dark ink was drawn, used for printing and for dyeing cloth.
Of the Roman city, since 2003, the best part has come back to the surface: the Domus del Mito, a large noble house built towards the end of the first century after Christ, a thousand square metres and twenty-seven rooms, held to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the last fifty years. Inside it is a complex of figurative mosaics, monochrome and polychrome, of excellent quality and for the most part splendidly preserved: Neptune and Amphitrite on the triumphal chariot drawn by sea horses, followed by Dionysus, and then the petrifying face of Medusa; in the triclinium a hunting and fishing scene surrounded by black and white geometric motifs. Those mosaics say two things: that the city was inside the circuit of the specialised mosaic workers, and that its owners were cultivated people. In the Middle Ages Sant'Angelo was the capital of the Massa Trabaria, the forest province of the Papal State — that is, the district the timber came from — and here the province's parliament met, covering the territory between Cagli, Urbino and the Apennine. The temporal government was entrusted to a gonfaloniere from the nobility and to three priors representing the city, the guilds and the contado. In July of 1849 Giuseppe Garibaldi passed through here in flight after the fall of the Roman Republic.
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📅 Every year, on 29 September
On 29 September Sant'Angelo in Vado celebrates Saint Michael the Archangel; the village also preserves the Domus del Mito, an ancient Roman house with mosaics.
Sheep's and cow's milk, aged twenty to thirty days: casciotta d'Urbino, Michelangelo's favourite cheese, has been DOP since 1996.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Sant'Angelo in Vado, but an easy day trip away.
