The square is recent; the quarter is not. Piazza Emigranti was inaugurated in 1984 together with the mural that defines it, «Il ritorno di Giustino», painted by Giovanni Brenna, an artist from Rionero, and it opens inside the Borgo Antico, the oldest part of Montemilone, the stretch that drops away below the mother church. The name is not municipal rhetoric: from the nineteenth century onwards the town watched its people leave for the Americas and, from the nineteen-sixties, for northern Italy and the industrial triangle, and the square arrived while that movement was still an everyday fact.
What to see
Brenna's mural is the reason people come here, and the title should be taken literally: not a departure, a return. The mother church of Santo Stefano faces onto the same space, dedicated to the protomartyr who, with the Madonna del Bosco, is co-patron of the town; inside it keeps the wooden statue of the Madonna del Bosco, a thirteenth-century work showing the Virgin according to Byzantine iconography.
The Borgo Antico around it is made of old farming houses, some still with ceilings built from wooden beams and reeds. In the alleys you pick out the stone doorways, the old chimneys and the twisting stairs that climb to raised entrances: this is a fabric you read by walking into it, not by looking down at it from the square.
Visiting
You arrive on foot and you go down: the Borgo Antico lies below the mother church and you enter it through the alleys, which were not made for cars. The right order is mural, then the front of the mother church, then the quarter; the square of 1984 works as the door to a much older fabric, and seen last it says nothing.
Our editors' tip
Stop for five minutes in front of the mural before you move, then go into the church and look for the Madonna del Bosco. The statue is thirteenth century, Brenna's painting is from 1984: more than seven centuries apart on the same square, and the best way to understand the Borgo Antico is to go from one to the other inside a minute.