Agugliano and its frazione Castel d'Emilio were, in the Middle Ages, two of the twenty or so castles of Ancona: subjects of the maritime republic for centuries, and built to keep away from the city whoever wanted it. Today, together with Camerata Picena, Offagna, Polverigi and Santa Maria Nuova, they are called the Terra dei Castelli. The first news of the place is in a bull of pope Alexander II of the twenty-sixth of December 1062, which names the Ecclesia Sanctae Mariae de Auguliano; the Castrum Agulliani appears only in 1356, listed in the Descriptio Marchiae of cardinal Albornoz. From 1390 Agugliano governed itself, with statutes of its own; when in 1532 the papacy occupied the republic of Ancona and Anconitan independence ended, Agugliano became an autonomous comune, made official with statutes approved in 1565 by Carlo Borromeo, then governor of Ancona. On the ninth of January 1847 there was born here Antonio Vico, who would become a cardinal, apostolic delegate in Colombia and nuncio in Belgium and in Spain; in 1926 he had the church of Santa Maria a Nazareth rebuilt, pulling down the bell-gable and putting up the bell tower that stands now, and his funeral monument is in the church of the Santissimo Sacramento.
But the thing written down here with most care is how a dialect dies. The old speech of Agugliano mixed features of Jesi and of Osimo, because the village sits about halfway between the two; then Ancona, standard Italian and what the description calls television Roman blurred it and in part cancelled it, so that between the speech of the seventy- and eighty-year-olds, that of the middle-aged and that of the young there is now a fracture. And inside the comune there is more than one dialect: the historic centre — Piazza, la Mura, Pradellu, Castellaro — speaks slightly differently from the Borgu Ruffini, which is the first ring of houses outside; Molino and Chiusa are different again, with Jesi and Chiaravalle in them; at Castel d'Emilio, on the border with Camerata Picena, there are certain velar «n» sounds. The changes can be heard word by word: monno and quanno are going back to mondo and quando, cantado is going back to cantato, piòe is becoming piove, and éa has been italianised first into avéa and then into aveva. What holds, because Ancona says it too, is the g of pogo and garbo, and the sound of scerèsgi for cherries.
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📅 Every year, on 22 January, with the seventeenth-century Peruzzini canvas
Agugliano celebrates its patron Saint Anastasius on 22 January, in the church dedicated to him, built in the sixteenth century, which holds a seventeenth-century canvas by the Ancona-born painter Antonio Francesco Peruzzini.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Agugliano, but an easy day trip away.
