Castelbellino

Castelbellino has a name that sounds gentle and is not: it comes from Castrum Ghibellinum, the name the castle took once it had been rebuilt, towards the middle of the thirteen hundreds, as the refuge of the Ghibellines driven out of nearby Jesi. Before that it was called Morro Panicale. The fortress had been founded by the Attoni, a family of Lombard stock and law that had come from Umbria over the Apennines and become counts of Jesi, who set themselves on the hill the better to exercise their feudal rights over the fertile country below. The first time Morro Panicale appears in a document is in 1079, when count Ugo degli Attoni gives the hermitage of Camaldoli a piece of land here to build an abbey on. In May of 1194 count Trasmondo di Morro Panicale made his act of submission to the comune of Jesi — and that was the first of a series of submissions and conquests which, through the twelve hundreds, formed the contado of Jesi, the Respublica Æsina, a circumscription that lasted until 1808. The castle that would be named after the Ghibellines, in short, begins by handing itself over to the city whose exiles it would later shelter.

Towards the middle of the thirteen hundreds, for having taken sides against cardinal Albornoz's army, the castle was destroyed and its Ghibelline leaders exiled; it was stubbornly rebuilt, and it had to face the same thing again in 1517. Federigo Angelelli wrote of the raids of Francesco Maria I della Rovere through the province — the same year and the same man that Corinaldo drove off after twenty-three days of siege — with the destruction of the rocca of Jesi on the third of June, the citizens taken prisoner, and fifty-three houses burned at Jesi and two hundred and three at Castelbellino: more went up in the castle than in the city. Today Castelbellino is by area one of the smallest comuni of the province and one of the most densely inhabited. It is the first of the castles you meet coming up from Jesi along the middle Esino valley; the slopes below it are vineyards, because here we are in the country of Verdicchio dei castelli di Jesi; and at Pantiere, down in the valley, in 1939 a statuette of considerable size was found showing an Italic Hercules of the first decades of the fifth century before Christ.