River
Flumen Rustunum
Conca
Listen to the story
A river springing from a mountain in the Apennines and running down to the Adriatic carries the label Flumen Rustunum. It is the Conca, which reaches the sea near Cattolica. The strange name is almost certainly the copyist's slip for Crustumium, the river the Roman writer Pliny named as the boundary between Italy's eighth region and Umbria, and which the poet Lucan called ravenous. That role as a border probably earned it a place on the map. Its mouth, though, is drawn on the wrong side of Pisaurum, now Pesaro, just where one would expect the river Pisaurus instead.