Arcevia

Arcevia was called Rocca Contrada for nearly the whole of its history, and that name is a man. The oldest documents that name the place are a monte de la Rocca of 1065 and a Rocha de Contrado of 1147, and the second is the interesting one, because it puts the castle in the hands of a lord called Contrado — from the Germanic Konrad, or from a contraction of «conte rado» — and so explains the compound name. The first settlement probably grew up during the barbarian invasions, to take in those fleeing the ruined Roman towns of Suasa, Ostra and Sena Gallica, today's Senigallia; under the Lombards, planted where the duchy of Spoleto met the gastaldate of Nocera Umbra and the Byzantine lands, it must have served as a garrison. In 754 the Franks gave it, along with other places, to pope Stephen II — and to the Franks tradition attributes the dedication of the church of San Medardo, a saint of theirs, a relic of whom is kept here. Clement IV recognised it as a city in 1266 and it stayed Guelph. When Ladislaus of Naples besieged it, it called in Braccio da Montone, who defeated the attackers and won back the castles around, and for this was proclaimed lord of the city; then came the troops of Francesco Sforza. Rocca Contrada was remembered as Propugnaculum Ecclesiae, the bulwark of the Church.

On the sixteenth of September 1817 an apostolic letter of Pius VII gave it the title of city and a new name: Arcevia, put together out of the Latin terms arces and via, «fortified place». So the town stopped being called after a man and took a name somebody had built for it out of Latin. Around it, in the frazioni, stand its castles — Nidastore, Loretello, San Pietro in Musio, Palazzo, Piticchio, Montale, Castiglioni, Avacelli. In the collegiate church of San Medardo, rebuilt in 1634, there are the polyptychs of Luca Signorelli and the ceramics of the Della Robbia. And on these hills, twenty thousand years ago, hunters came back season after season to Ponte di Pietra to work flint: the hearths and the post holes say they put up light huts on small wooden poles, probably covered with skins — a camp that existed in order to make tools. Arcevia holds the bronze medal for military valour for the war of liberation, and it holds it for a day of May 1944 as well, when seventy people were killed on Monte Sant'Angelo.