Hotel Villa Matarazzo - History and Surrounding

Villa Matarazzo is located in Fanano, a hill full of charm and history, a few kilometers from Gradara, theater of Paolo and Francesca's love story narrated by Dante in the fifth canto of the Divine Comedy. The first news of the great villa dating to the Middle Ages, when it housed a convent for nuns.

Matarazzo family, from Naples, was of humble origins and poor economic conditions.
In 1870, Francesco Matarazzo emigrated to Brazil in search of fortune overseas. The good fortune smiles: he became wealthy landowner before, a factory owner then, and finally a real estate manager in Brazil. We are in the 20s, his son, Edward, life and interests divided between Rome and Brazil and with the rise of Fascism he became a Count as a reward for substantial subsidies to Mussolini. Because of this Edward married Countess Bianca Troise Roman, daughter of Governor of the Bank of Italy. In 1930, attracted by the beauty of Fanano, they bought the only decent house in the village, owned by the fallen noble Pesaro Sante Cinelli, to spend the summer holidays, then they made their home until the death of the Earl died in the year '60. Oral histories collected by the inhabitants of the pair Fanano how beautiful, rich and generous, to the point that the whole country economically gravitated around it: bricklayers, cooks, the maids, chauffeurs, gardeners etc. Between 1934 and 1936 were born two daughters, Gabriella and Claudia

Fall into oblivion and utter degradation, Villa Matarazzo was recently given a new life with great love and passion into a highly prestigious Relais is a feast for the eyes and brings peace to the soul.

The church, dating from about 1200, the center is dedicated to St. Fanano Michael and depended on the parish of St. Christopher to Aquilam.

The name is of Roman origin Fanano: Fundus Fanianus, ie farm Fanio perhaps an inhabitant of an ancient center of the pass between Siligata and Catholic. During the barbarian invasions it is easy to assume that some residents climbed on this hill and founded the Castrum Fanani, Fanano castle where the castle is equivalent to country. Starting then from the eleventh century until the fourteenth, the territory was taken over by the Archbishop of Ravenna, having inherited from the Byzantine Pentapolis.

With the advent of Malatesta Fanano story merges with that of the most important Gradara, then passed to the lords of the Sforza family, the Della Rovere and the Papal domination (1631).