virtual tour
Municipality of Pesaro
The building typology consists of a ground floor, a basement floor and the relative cave. The supporting structure is in masonry with a saddle roof. Three elevations are regular and one elevation is adhering to the adjoining building (formerly Palazzo Moretti). The body of the building has an irregular rectangular planimetric system, with an internal garden on the ground floor, built into the city walls.
The building is not accessible, since the roof has partially collapsed. Given the conditions of the building, it is not possible to access the internal garden, the basement and the related cave. The building was declared of significant historical and architectural interest with Resolution of the Regional Commission for Cultural Heritage no. 101 of 06/14/2016 (Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism- Regional Secretariat of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism of the Marche- Ancona).
On the external facades, partially plastered and painted with wooden window frames, there are decorative elements such as platbands and buffered arches, shaped frames that run under the overhang of the roof. The entrance portal is framed with pilasters and an arch above the door with a keystone.
The building stands inside the urban walls of the village of Fiorenzuola di Focara, probably on an ancient pre-existence, and its construction is due to the fact that Fiorenzuola was an autonomous municipality from 1861 to 1929, before being annexed to the municipality of Pesaro. The building, adjacent to Palazzo Moretti, perhaps initially intended to house the offices responsible for political and administrative functions, was destined for civilian housing, a medical clinic and a local doctor's garage after the war.
Fiorenzuola was one of the four castles (together with Casteldimezzo, Gradara and Granarola) built between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, in order to constitute an organic defensive system for the control of the Siligata pass, in the area bordering the Dioceses of Ravenna and Pesaro first, and between the Malatesta of Rimini and those of Pesaro then.
As early as 1500, documents testify how the inhabitants of Fiorenzuola supplemented their income as farmers and sailors with additional revebues from the cliff stone. At the end of the nineteenth century, a first Mutual Aid Company was established, while in 1919 a cooperative was formed with 54 members, which had orders throughout Italy. Competition from asphalt and porphyry will determine the crisis in the sector and the dissolution of the cooperative around the 1960s. The job was to collect the characteristic rounded pebbles from the sea and chisel them until they take the form of their final use; paving of streets and squares. It was hard work that involved whole families in various ways. They worked directly on the beach, up to 16 hours a day, protected only by a reed screen as a shelter from bad weather. These activities contribute to the repopulation of the village in the twentieth century, creating the need to provide a building used as a school and a medical clinic.
From the village of Fiorenzuola di Focara begins the Path of Love, connected to the Path of the Sea n. 15, descending to the beach through an asphalted road closed to traffic. The tourist offer aims at enhancing the paths of the San Bartolo Park, with particular reference to the Rive of San Bartolo. The term "Rive" refers to both the coastal line and the slopes that descend steeply from the slopes of the coastal hills, that is to say the whole coast between Gabicce and Pesaro, with a steep cliff eroded by the sea. These soils, mostly impractical, remain uncultivated until the late eighteenth century,i.e. until the strong demographic increase leads to the cultivation of less productive lands. In the twentieth century, Count Albani was the owner of Monte San Bartolo. The Rive were inhabited by the count's sharecroppers who lived in farmhouses until, like all other families, they left the land to go to work in the city. After the war, sharecroppers could count on a dense network of caves dug in the sandstone down the Rive, to hide part of the harvest from the count and the farmer before the division. From Piazzale Hermitage you can enjoy a wide view of the Adriatic and the cliff, which reminds through the farmhouses, the time when the cliff was cultivated up to the beach, before the erosion made the land and the houses farmhouses were swallowed by the sea.
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