Sant'Angelo in Vado

Sant'Angelo in Vado sits on a river terrace on the right bank of the upper Metauro, sixty kilometers from Perugia and twenty from Urbino. The Roman city of Tifernum Mataurense lies underneath the modern town: a municipium from the first century BC, built on a grid with the cardo maximus running past the public baths to a forum under the former convent of Santa Caterina. Excavations from 2003 onward uncovered the Domus del Mito, a 1,000-square-meter noble house from the late first century AD with 27 rooms and a sequence of polychrome figurative mosaics of Neptune and Amphitrite, Dionysus and Medusa that survive almost intact.

The white truffle fair began in 1963, the oldest in Italy after Alba, and runs across the weekends of October and the first half of November in Palazzo Mercuri and the streets around it. The Centro Sperimentale di Tartuficoltura, the national research center for truffle cultivation, has been based here since the 1980s.