Tavullia

Until a few years before the Second World War this town was called Tomba di Pesaro, and in the Gallo-Picene dialect it is still called that: La Tomba. No grave is involved — tomba is a Latin word meaning a height — but the name was changed all the same, and Tavullia comes from the valley of the Tavollo, where the main settlement lies. There is another thing that makes Tavullia unlike its neighbours: the comune is in two pieces. The hamlets of Belvedere Fogliense, Padiglione and Rio Salso make an exclave detached from the rest, on the left of the Foglia, shut in between the territories of Mondaino, Montecalvo in Foglia, Montegridolfo and Vallefoglia, and in daily life they look towards Montecchio.

The territory was full of castles, and almost nothing is left of them: of the castle of Monteluro, which for centuries was a strategic post, only the ruins have come down to us. Here the Malatesta, Guelphs, and the Montefeltro, Ghibellines, fought each other at length, and the bloodiest battle was fought precisely around Monteluro, in 1443, when the intervention of the Sforza on the Malatesta side decided their victory. In the church of San Lorenzo, on the back wall of the apse, there is a Last Supper by Nicolò Martinelli known as il Trometta, datable to about 1570 and brought here from a church in Pesaro: a grand mannerist scheme, with the raised viewpoint that builds a deliberately unnatural perspective, and at the same time a care for detail that comes from northern painting. And then there is the thing for which the name of the town travels the world: at Tavullia Valentino Rossi grew up, nine times world champion, and his team has its seat here; his father Graziano raced motorcycles too.