Cerreto d'Esi

In a village of a few thousand people, the tower is called Belisarius's and the gate is called the Justinian gate. It is not a pose: the first nucleus of Cerreto was formed by some inhabitants of nearby Tuficum who, during the Lombard invasion, sought refuge in the surrounding hills, and during the Greek-Gothic war that nucleus, suitably fortified, became a stronghold of the general Belisarius. From that season the town carries its two Byzantine names, the civic tower and the upper gate, which still stand in the old centre together with the fountain of the Dolphins: a circular basin of sandstone from Signa, in Tuscany, with at its centre a triangular base from which rises a column with a Corinthian capital, and around the column three dolphins coiled. As sixteenth-century writings show, the town had from the Middle Ages the faculty to legislate — that is, to give itself its own laws.

The churches of Cerreto are many for its size, and one in particular tells how people lived. The Madonna della Venza, originally a simple shrine of the early sixteen hundreds and later turned into a little church, has on its single altar a fresco showing the Madonna della Quercia of Viterbo: the people of Cerreto who migrated seasonally to that city for farm work were devoted to her, and this is how they brought her home. Santa Maria delle Grazie carries over its door a stone with the date 1598, thought to be the year it was built; in the sacristy there is a fresco attributed to the fifteenth-century Fabriano school, with the Madonna between Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Leopardus martyr, and in 1678 a gilded wooden altar was made for it. The church of San Giovanni Evangelista, in the garden of villa Incrocca, was built in 1760 by the Ramelli family of Fabriano, and the church of San Leopardo, at the beginning of the twelve hundreds, depended on the monastery of San Vittore delle Chiuse. The town lies in a small Apennine valley crossed by the Esino, with Monte San Vicino reaching fifteen hundred metres to the east.