There is a particular sound that used to fill certain Italian hill towns and has almost entirely gone out of the world: the ringing of a hammer on copper, struck thousands of times until a flat disc of metal swells slowly into a pot or a pan. In the little town of Force, in the Marche, up in the green foothills of the Sibillini Mountains, that sound was once the pulse of the place: they called it, and still call it, il borgo del rame, the village of copper, and though the workshops long fell silent, the town decided its coppersmiths are worth remembering.
Force sits about 2,260 feet up, on a high spur of land where the valleys of the Aso and the Tesino rivers divide, and its very name seems to come from that geography, that is, from forca, the fork, for the town’s perch at the parting of the ways. People took shelter on this hilltop as far back as the fifth century, in the unsettled years of the barbarian invasions, when a defensible height was worth more than good soil.
