Castelplanio

According to the legend, which some scholars support, Castelplanio comes from another town: Roman Planina, which stood where Monte Roberto is now. Its people, fleeing the Visigoths in the 5th century, are said to have rebuilt everything on the other bank of the Esino, in a high and defensible place, carrying the name with them. The documents are drier: Castra Plani appears for the first time in 1283, in a codex listing the castles dependent on Jesi, and the settlement probably grew around the Benedictine abbey of San Benedetto de' Frondigliosi, known from 1199. In the town hall is kept a Roman epigraph signed by Quinto Precio Proculo, a rich landowner of the ancient city of Ostra.

In 1447 the papal troops of Niccolò Piccinino brought the territory back to the Church after practically razing the village, and it took nearly thirty years to put the houses and the castle up again. On 24 April 1741 an earthquake badly damaged the whole village without killing a single person: the people of Castelplanio then raised the saint of that day, San Giuseppe, to be their patron. The hamlets say what they were: Macine takes its name from the old quarrying of millstones, and before that it was called contrada la Moja, from the local word for the marshes the Esino made there; Borgo Loreto began as an Osteria, a posting station for changing horses on the road between Ancona and Rome, and took its present name in the middle of the 19th century from the church of Maria Santissima di Loreto. They all sit on the via Clementina, built at the order of pope Clement XII.