Sassocorvaro Auditore

The Rocca Ubaldinesca stands on the hill above the Foglia valley, and it was built around 1475 to a design by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, in the first years of his service as military architect and engineer to duke Federico da Montefeltro; the fortress belonged to Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, the duke's half-brother. Between 1943 and 1944 Pasquale Rotondi, superintendent of fine arts for Pesaro and Urbino, looked at that fortress and saw in it the safe place to shelter a good part of Italy's movable artistic heritage. Between Sassocorvaro, Urbino and Carpegna more than ten thousand masterpieces were gathered, and more than six thousand five hundred of them came here: Giorgione's Tempesta, the Città ideale, works brought from Venice, Urbino, Pesaro, Fano, Ancona, Fabriano, Jesi, Osimo, Macerata, Fermo, Ascoli Piceno, and paintings by Raffaello, Piero della Francesca, Carlo Crivelli, Titian, Lorenzo Lotto, Paolo Uccello, Andrea Mantegna. For those months this fortress was the building with the highest concentration of art in the world, and nobody was meant to know it. Nobody did: the operation stayed secret until 1984, when a wide piece of research brought the whole affair back to light.

The irony of the place is that the safest fortress in Italy then found itself on the front: between October 1943 and September 1944 part of this territory lay inside the Gothic Line, and at Casinina there is the historical museum that tells it. The village had been a fief of the Brancaleoni, then long disputed between the Montefeltro and the Malatesta, and it was given in fief to the Ubaldini; after the short rule of Cesare Borgia, in 1502, it passed to the Doria of Genoa, and in 1631, with the duchy of Urbino, to the Church. The name may be the rock that was a nest for crows, or it may come from the Latin corbis, a basket. Today Sassocorvaro is not a comune of its own: after a referendum it joined with Auditore, and on the first of January 2019 the comune of Sassocorvaro Auditore was born, of which it is the chief town. It is a scattered comune, it lies in the Montefeltro and partly in historical Romagna, and its territory is divided among three dioceses.