San Leo

San Leo has been awarded the title of one of “The Most Beautiful Villages in Italy” and an Orange Flag by the Italian Touring Club.

San Leo, a magnificent art capital mentioned by Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy, is the heart of the historical region of Montefeltro and the town that gave it its name. Famed for various historical and geopolitical events, it has been the location for documentaries and films, is a popular tourist destination and a jewel of the province of Rimini. Its extraordinary geological onfiguration, on a rocky mass with sheer sides, has determined its dual military and religious importance since prehistorical times, testified by precious architectural and artistic artefacts.

The town was once called Monte Feltro, from Mons Feretrus, a name linked to the important Roman settlement built around a temple dedicated to Jupiter Feretrius. As early as the 3rd century BC, the Romans built a fortification on its highest point. The early Christian period (2nd century AD) was characterized by its evangelization following the arrival of Leo and Marino, two Dalmatian stonecutters who founded the Christian communities of San Leo and San Marino thus favouring the spread of Christianity throughout the area until the foundation of the diocese of Montefeltro. Leo is thought to have been the first bishop of the district and built the original memorial on which the parish church was constructed during the Carolingian period, then renovated in the
pre-Romanesque period.

In the 7th century a cathedral devoted to the cult of San Leo was built next to it. It was renovated in 1173, adopting a Romanesque-Lombard layout and was joined to the imposing Byzantine bell tower. In the 12th century the civitas Sanctis Leonis was an urban area consisting in a Bishop’s Palace and clergymen’s residence, the nucleus of the holy town, with other buildings commissioned by the Montefeltro who had settled here, arriving from nearby Carpegna in the mid-12th century. They took the name of the ancient city-fortress of Montefeltro-San Leo, a city that for two years from 962 had been the capital of Italy under the reign of Berengario II.

To this day, the rigour and beauty of the old town have remained intact and it boasts a number of Romanesque buildings like the parish church, cathedral and tower, along with several Renaissance buildings like the Medici Palace, which houses the elegant Museum of Sacred Art, the residence of the Severini-Nardini Counts and Palazzo Della Rovere, now the town hall. The heart of San Leo is the square named after Dante who stayed here, as did St. Francis, who was given Mount della Verna as a gift from Count di Chiusi. The fortress designed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini is on the highest peak and is where Giuseppe Balsamo, known as Count Cagliostro, was imprisoned in 1791 until his death 4 years later.

Cagliostro and San Leo, an unbreakable bond

The town is linked to a figure who was somewhere between a healer and a sorcerer, a heretic and a freemason, an alchemist and a swindler who spent many dark years in the capital of the Montefeltro, accused of heresy and jailed by the Holy Inquisition despite his reneging and repentance. San Leo became famous thanks to its illustrious guest; fame it also deserved for its grandeur and ancient history, its position and its art. From when he was imprisoned there in 1791 until his death in 1795, the castle in particular was linked to the man known as Count Cagliostro, Giuseppe Balsamo born in Palermo in 1742. Federico da Montefeltro could never have imagined his magnificent residence, redesigned during the Renaissance by the gifted Siena-born architect Francesco di Giorgio Martini, would be remembered because of this controversial figure.

However history is capable of this and more and there’s little point trying to tackle the issue of who Cagliostro really was. The phenomenon has taken on astounding proportions in Italy and worldwide. Far better to leave the figure shrouded in the mystery that surrounded him during the age of enlightenment. Suffice to mention authors of the calibre of Dumas, Schiller and Tolstoy who drew inspiration from him for their characters. Goethe wrote that we should “consider Cagliostro a scoundrel and his adventures swindles”, whilst the Venetian Casanova called him “a talented layabout who prefers living like a vagabond to an existence of hard work”. The fact remains that the life of the Sicilian has always been a mystery; this continued even after death due to the disappearance of his body after burial near the fortress of San Leo. This mystery is fuelled by those who have written about him, who still follow him and who still put a bunch of red roses on the wooden bed in his cell every year on his birthday without ever being seen. His cell is called the “pozzetto” or “little well”; the only entrance was a small hole from which food was dropped and it has only one opening towards the outside. Barred by grating it forced the prisoner to look at either the cathedral or the parish church.

He has been credited with many great feats, thanks to the benevolence of aristocrats and even kings and queens, but was also the victim of swindles that led to his downfall. He brought a totally personal stance to freemasonry, interpreting and adopting a doctrine based on Egyptian rites to the order he had founded and was grand master of. An unusual son of the enlightenment who learnt little from it in terms of scientific and philosophical rigour, making cosmopolitism his own. He lived without limits and San Leo celebrates his ever present memory.