Mural of Cerbara

Mural of 114 meters dedicated to the Battle of Metauro.

MURALE DI CERBARA - The mural was created in 2021 in Cerbara by the artist Natale Patrizi, in art Agrà, to recall the battle that took place in the plain of the river Metauro in 207 BC, when the army of thirty thousand men of the Carthaginian Asdrubal Barca, brother of Annibale, with his elephants, was defeated by the Roman consuls Gaius Claudius Nero and Marcus Livius Salinator, an epic clash that became crucial for the outcome of the Second Punic War in favor of the latter. The painting, which extends over a length of 114 meters for a height of almost 3 meters, was built on a retaining wall of an artificial watercourse that feeds a small hydroelectric power plant ENEL. The artist has used the ancient technique of painting "lime" without the use of colors, deriving the silhouettes of the figures to be represented from the vegetal layer of mosses, lichens and molds, which covers the masonry. The result is amazing: an endless sequence of silhouettes surrounded by white, plastic forms in chiaroscuro that seem to emerge from nowhere, twisted figures of men and animals opposed in bloody challenges, distorted faces in grimaces of pain, Bodies exhausted by the struggle and mutilated by weapons, overwhelmed by the strength of the pachyderms and overwhelmed by the intensity of the fighting. In a very short time, from wall degraded and abandoned, the site has become a popular tourist destination for scholars, photographers and visitors from different parts of Italy and abroad.