Ancarano

In 1490 the quarrels over the boundaries of Ancarano ended with the peace of Torano Nuovo, and according to some it was for that very occasion that a Renaissance statue of the Madonna della Pace was commissioned from Silvestro dell'Aquila; it cost fifty-four ducats and gave the church its name. Over the centuries the statue had been tampered with: someone had set the Child upright in his mother's arms. In the restoration that followed the earthquake of 2009 he was put back crouching against her, which is how the sculptor had made him — and the proof lies in the Madonna herself, whose face is tilted downwards and who is looking at a child who is not standing. The old church that held her, inside the walls, was demolished as unstable and only its bell tower remains; the statue today stands in a church of 1958 that inherited the name.

Ancarano belonged to Ascoli Piceno; it lies on the south bank of the Tronto, and to the north it still borders three comuni of the Marche. Charlemagne, having come down to put down the Lombards, destroyed the village and then had it rebuilt as a castle and gave it to the bishop of Ascoli, who made it his summer residence: the bishop's palace stood in the middle of the village and is today the town hall. Being on a border cost it dear: in the fifteen hundreds, during the war of the Tronto fought against the pope over the price of salt, the duke of Alba besieged the place and destroyed half of it — and the missing portion, to the north, can still be seen. Then the borders themselves began to move. Ancarano was in Murat's kingdom of Naples, in the Papal State from 1818, for a few weeks in Mazzini's Roman Republic in 1848, in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies from 1852 after an exchange of territories, and in the kingdom of Italy after the plebiscite of 1860; the province of Teramo took it officially only in 1927.