On June 29, 1450 in Anghiari it is a day of celebration: there is the annual fair of San Pietro. As often happens on these occasions, disputes and arguments arise between the citizens of Anghiari and the bourgeois guests. The discussions, which is not uncommon between the two neighboring communities, escalate into a brawl and the people of Anghiari forcefully drive the Biturgians out of their city. In retaliation, the expelled Biturgians, who return late in the evening, tear off the latch, or "catorcio," from the Porta del Ponte as an act of defiance and bring it to their city, displaying it as a trophy in the main square. Some chroniclers claim that this "prank" even gave rise to the tradition of the Balestra Palio. Soon after, as expected, the people of Anghiari organize a raid and manage to secretly retrieve the catorcio and bring it back home. They safely store it in the Cancelleria, but the disputes continue for centuries, leading the rulers to "seize" the object of contention and transfer it to Florence (1737). Even in the 1960s, the catorcio was kept as evidence at the State Archive.

This episode inspired a saga of a seventeenth-century tragicomic poem, precisely the Catorcio di Anghiari (or "Catorceide"), by the writer Federigo Nomi, clearly inspired by the successful Secchia rapita by Alessandro Tassoni. A literary genre very popular in the Baroque era, which, as Don Quixote universally made clear, is the result of a literary search for the comic and the spectacular without resorting to the marvelous, but based on an ethical foundation of anti-chivalrous and anti-heroic values. Thus, a burlesque poem has handed down to us the dispute over the catorcio, transformed into acts of war between two nonexistent realms, ancient "feuds" between neighboring municipalities. These are carried out through "outrages" and "skirmishes" of low profile: thefts, irreverent pranks on women doing laundry, hurling of verbal insults, thwarted loves.