Chiaravalle

A codex kept in the Sessorian library relates that it was the Lombard queen Theodelinda, in the time of Pope Gregory, who had a monastery built on the bank of the Esino, in the middle of a wood of chestnut oaks. To the Benedictine monks, says the same source, the queen granted leave to put up two rows of huts made of clay and straw dried in the sun. Those huts have been gone for thirteen centuries, but the quarter between today's via Cavour and via Castelfidardo is still called by the people Capanne davanti and Capanne de dietro, huts in front and huts behind, and the townspeople of the centre call themselves Capannari to mark themselves off from those of the countryside. In August the Festa delle Capanne is held, and the oldest feel it more than any other. The monastery later became Cistercian, and from that came the name of the town: Chiaravalle, that is Clairvaux.

The comune exists because a pope settled a boundary quarrel by taking the abbey away from everyone. The monastic lands lay between the castles of Ancona and the designs of Jesi, which needed precisely those lands to reach the sea: after legal and armed clashes the abbey was assigned to Ancona, but in 1486, since the demands from Jesi would not subside, it was declared an abbazia nullius, that is subject to no urban centre. That independence, given for religious reasons, became the basis of the comune. In 1499 the Cistercians left the monastery and went back to France; they returned in 1564, but they were too few to work the lands and granted them in emphyteusis, and around the abbey a town was born. In 1759 a cardinal, the commendatory abbot, founded the tobacco manufactory there, which became the wealth of the place and the work of the sigaraie, the women cigar-makers. Here, in 1870, Maria Montessori was born.