Camerano

At Camerano they say there is more of it below than above. Under the old centre, dug into the sandstone, there is an underground city: tunnels that run on like a labyrinth and that for a long time were taken for old sandstone quarries or wine cellars. Then exploration found, in almost every room, that these are no cellars: dome, sail and barrel vaults, circular halls, columns, friezes, ornamental motifs and religious symbols — architecture, and made with taste. Who dug them and when is not known, because there are no documents and only the oral tradition is left, which says that the caves are as old as the town is old. During the Second World War the people went down into them to shelter from the bombing.

Above ground, the town is as old as the caves claim to be: in contrada San Giovanni more than a hundred Picene tombs have come to light, enough to make it one of the first Picene settlements in the Marche. Then the name appears in the papal privileges of 1177 and 1183 as Castro Camurani; in 1198 Camerano figures for the first time as an independent comune, inside the league that opposed the envoy of Henry VI; and in 1212 it had two consuls with first and last names, Bernardo Ionathe and Stefano Marchi: a short spell as a free comune, before it fell under Ancona and became one of its twenty castles, charged with defending the Conero together with Varano, Poggio, Massignano and Sirolo. In 1625 Carlo Maratti was born here, a central figure of Roman painting in the seventeenth century. In the nineteen sixties the town turned into an industrial centre, beginning with musical instruments; and on its hills they make Rosso Conero.