Carpegna

The town sits at 748 meters on the southern slope of the peak that anchors the Montefeltro between the Marche, Emilia-Romagna and the Republic of San Marino. That position, mountain above and cured-meat trade below, has held the same shape since the family that governs from the palazzo first took the territory: over a thousand years of continuity on one slope, with the pigs of Lombardy, Emilia and the Marche brought here specifically for the dry air that the altitude provides. The park that surrounds the town extends that same relationship between height and character.

Its beech, hornbeam and oak enclose the ruins of a planned town abandoned in the seventeenth century, a settlement that failed where Carpegna's did not. The mountain, in other words, has been the constant: it gives the air that cures the meat, the slope that the family built on, and the forest that outlasted a rival town founded in its shadow.