01 - Piazzale Giuseppe Garibaldi - Once upon a time there was a traveler

It was 1881 and an English architect decided to take a trip between Romagna and Marche, equipped with a notebook to note down every detail. His name was Thomas Graham Jackson and he had a particular predilection for the style called neo-Gothic, which recovered Gothic atmospheres and style. Nothing new, especially in England, where this trend has produced fabulous homes and decorations of great interest. But his is also a taste, a way of looking at places, a feeling that pushes one to seek dark and frightening atmospheres even simply in urban or suburban contexts that are not yet too developed.

And Jackson sees Pesaro as a neo-Gothic place, so much so that, after having noted that the railway “follows the coast and runs parallel to the old Via Flaminia that led from Ariminum to Pisaurum”, he writes that “The station is located a little outside the city and so we made the cobblestones of dark and gloomy streets resonate”.

Today the Trebbio area is a busy area that quickly connects the historic center to the outskirts. Jackson could not have imagined that the area would become a crowded crossroads and that a bridge would completely transform the skyline that divided the city from the countryside.

He may have exaggerated, but we can imagine that before 1891, the year in which the Garibaldi monument created by the artist Ettore Ximenes was placed, Pesaro was still a city closed around its historic center and that the trivium (the place where three roads cross) marked the end of the inhabited area and the beginning of the countryside with the Porta Collina that closed the entrance.

The face of the city had already changed a lot in the first decades of the 19th century, thanks to Giulio and Gordiano Perticari, with the inauguration of a large and modern theater (1816-16) then renovated in 1855; thanks to Pompeo Mancini who was entrusted with the construction of the Pescheria and the Orti Giulii; in 1861 an observatory was inaugurated and in 1891 an auditorium was inaugurated; at Porta Collina the mentally ill were taken away, housed in too precarious conditions.

But the city infrastructures developed starting from the end of the century. The arrival of the railway in 1861 had already disrupted the Pesaro landscape: towards Urbino, where the walls disappeared and a new road system opened up, and also towards Fano, where the countryside was crossed by the “very fast” new means of transport. But it was in the years following Jackson’s visit that Pesaro opened its doors, or rather knocked them down, to expand the urban landscape towards larger areas.

But what was Jackson doing in Pesaro?