Terre Roveresche

Before 1 January 2017 this comune did not exist. It was made by putting together four comuni: Barchi, Orciano di Pesaro, Piagge and San Giorgio di Pesaro. The question put to the people on 13 November 2016 was exactly that, with the four names one by one, and the polls stayed open from seven in the morning until eleven at night. The four were extinguished and, by the same act, set up again as municipi of the new comune: each of them, that is, still has its own body. The arms say the same thing: the acorn-bearing oak of the Della Rovere, whose lands these were, and four stars in the chief, one for each of the comuni that no longer exist.

Each of the four also keeps a museum of its own, and set side by side they make a curious collection: at Piagge an underground grotto; at San Giorgio a museum of history and environment; at Orciano a museum of rope and brick; and at Barchi a museum of jars and of the men who made them — and, in the same rooms, of the Grossi band, the brigands of these hills. The comune is a scattered one and its ground runs from the thirty metres of Cerbara, down where the Metauro flows, to the three hundred and nineteen of Barchi.