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The duke afterwards ordered all his horsemen and infantry, of which there were more than two thousand cavalry and ten thousand footmen, to assemble by daybreak at the Metauro, a river five miles distant from Fano, and await him there.
"In the woods at Acquasparta, where the river Metauro is no better than a brook. Some two leagues this side of Sant' Angelo." "Sant' Angelo!" echoed Gian Maria, starting at the very mention of the place where the late conspiracy against him had been hatched. "And when was this?" "On the Wednesday before Easter, as Monna Valentina was journeying from Santa Sofia to Urbino."
At Urbino he wrote the unfinished canzone to the river Metauro, one of the most touching of his compositions, in which he laments the wounds which fortune had inflicted upon him through the whole of his hapless life. But the tenure of princely favour at Italian courts, amid so many ambitious patrons and anxious suitors, was very precarious. It was uncommonly so at Ferrara.
The sarcophagi were to support statue-portraits of the Dukes and Popes, with Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano. At their base, upon the ground, were to repose six rivers, two for each tomb, showing that each sepulchre would have held two figures. The rivers were perhaps Arno, Tiber, Metauro, Po, Taro, and Ticino.
That stream is still called the Metauro; and wakens by its name recollections of the resolute daring of ancient Rome, and of the slaughter that stained its current two thousand and sixty-three years ago, when the combined consular armies of Livius and Nero encountered and crushed near its banks the varied hosts which Hannibal's brother was leading from the Pyrenees, the Rhone, the Alps, and the Po, to aid the great Carthaginian in his stern struggle to annihilate the growing might of the Roman Republic, and make the Punic power supreme over all the nations of the world.
He found himself, therefore, on the last day of December at the Metauro with his men, and having sent a cavalcade of about two hundred horsemen before him, he then moved forward the infantry, whom he accompanied with the rest of the men-at-arms.
The latter was now so far restored as to be able to sit a mule, but lest the riding should over-tire him they proceeded at little more than an ambling pace along the lovely valleys of the Metauro. Thus it befell that when night descended it found them still journeying, and some two leagues distant from Urbino.
Amerini, Fanfulla had seen slain, whilst the remaining two, being both unhorsed, would doubtless be the prisoners of Masuccio. Some three miles beyond Sant' Angelo, Fanfulla's weary horse splashed across a ford of the Metauro, and thus, towards the second hour of night, they gained the territory of Urbino, where for the time they might hold themselves safe from all pursuit.
Here, then, is Macchiavelli's story of the event: On the morning of December 31 Cesare's army, composed of 10,000 foot and 3,000 horse, was drawn up on the banks of the River Metauro some five miles from Sinigaglia in accordance with his orders, awaiting his arrival.
The sarcophagi were to support portrait statues of the Dukes and Popes, of Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano. At the foot were to be six rivers, two under each tomb—the Arno, Tiber, Metauro, Po, Taro, and Ticino. The drawings go to prove that the architectural background, as we see it now, is as incomplete as it looks.
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