Among the oldest monuments of Fano, a precious testimony of the city's past and its thousand-year history, the suggestive Porta della Mandria stands out: located along the city walls, the gate, whose name derives from the habit in medieval times of bringing in this area the herds graze, it is the second Roman gate of Fano and allowed the exit from the city of the ancient Via Flaminia in the direction of Pesaro.
Having partially escaped the ancient demolitions and then the recent ones, coming to light in 1925 during one of the attempts, fortunately averted, to demolish the Roman walls, the Porta della Mandria, an integral part of the defensive walls of the city, allowed one to exit Fano and head towards Pesaro through the inhabited areas of San Biagio, Roncosambaccio and Trebbiantico. Renovated and remodeled several times over the centuries until it reached its current appearance, the Porta della Mandria has a very simple but imposing structure and opens in the middle of an interturrium in the stretch of walls known as "della Mandria" from which it takes its name. . It consists of a large stone arch in the center of which is the main opening. It is 3.56 meters wide on the outside and 4.15 meters on the inside, while the depth is 2.67 meters. The height of the passage up to the arch's impost is 3.56 meters and in total it is 5.35 metres. Taking into account that the height of the wall including the battlements should not exceed 13 metres, the door as a whole was more than proportionate to the wall in which it was inserted with this modest height. Exactly centered and aligned with the road that reached it, the Porta della Mandria is intact up to approximately the arch's impost, made of parallelepiped blocks of local yellow sandstone, while in the upper part it is the result of careful restoration carried out by recovering the surviving boulders , relocated, with the necessary brick additions, to the original position.
Its name "Gate of the Herd" derives from the medieval habit of bringing herds to graze in this area of the walls. The gate also guaranteed the passage of commercial carts, as evidenced by the sign on the stones of the arch of the continuous scraping of the metal hubs of the wheels of the vehicles, when turning towards the city centre.
