The two fortresses of Ferentillo watching
the Valley of Nera, a fortification system to defence of the Abbazia di San
Pietro in Valle
The origin of
Ferentillo goes back
to the VIII century, to the epoch in which the king of the Longobards
Liutprando came to the
Valley of
Nera from the old city of
Ferento, colonizing this portion of
Umbria.
The importance of the strategic position is testified by its urban structure
with the residences distributed along the two ridges of the valley that connect
toward the end of the river course. To protect the territory it is risen in
fact a strong defensive system, characterized by the presence of a solid
boundaries provided of towers, direct emanation of the two separate castles,
the one of
Precetto to the left, and of
Mattarella to the right,
both fourteenth-century ones. The whole community of Ferentillo developed to
protect of the near
Abbazia di San Pietro in Valle, which became a quite
wide feud. The legend tells that the hermits
Lazzaro and
Giovanni,
searching an isolated and solitary place, in the IV century they were stopped
few away from Ferentillo, giving life to a hermitage that some centuries later
would be turned into the actual abbey. This primarily happened thanks to work
of
Faroaldo II, duke of
Spoleto, who in the VIII century built
the church and the monastery which adopted the rule of
San Benedetto.
Faroaldo took orders and after his dead his bare were buried in the abbey. The
complex today is of ownership of private.
Ferentillo's particularity resides in
being a city clearly subdivided in two stumps, each one set on the two sides of
the protection ridge of the valley. The nucleus that takes the name from
Matterello extends along the coast of Mount Gabbio, it possesses an imposing
fortress endowed with the donjon and the boundaries. Two are the churches
around which the suburb is built, the
Church of Saint Maria, built in
the '200s but retouched in the XVI century and the
Church of San Giovanni
Battista.
The suburb of Precetto too preserves a
mighty system of fortification with embattled boundaries and towers to protect
the side set on
Mount Sant'Angelo. To the thirteenth-century part is
added the most recent one, developed beginning from the XVI and XVII century,
following the course of the underlying lowland. The most important building of
this part of the suburb is certainly the
Parish Church of Santo Stefano,
a building of the '200s in whose crypt have been recovered the famous
mummies.
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