Cupramontana

For a thousand years or so this place was called Massaccio: the name came with the Lombards, when it belonged to the duchy of Spoleto-Camerino. Before that it had been an important Roman municipium, whose core lay where the cemetery is now and of which there survives a cistern people call the Barlozzo. And before that again there was a temple to Cupra, the goddess of fertility and beauty whom the Piceni worshipped, and it is from her that the ancient name came. In the twelve hundreds the site was inherited as Patrimonium Imperii by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa; at the death of Conradin of Swabia the pope put it into the county of Jesi, and so into the Papal State. Massaccio it remained until the unification of Italy: a royal decree of the first of December 1861 authorised the return to the old name, and Massaccio became Cupramontana again, the Cupra of the mountain — while the other Cupra, the one by the sea, on the far side of the region, would take its own name back the year after.

In the fourteen hundreds some members of the heretical group of the Bertolani, called fraticelli, settled here, a sect the Church was hunting all through the county of Jesi in those years; and in 1458 a group of them killed the prior of the local monastery, the blessed Angelo da Massaccio, whose body still lies in the abbey that bears his name, the Camaldolese house built in 1180 out in the country. Their own papers, here, they keep well: the library, set up in 1872 with the book collections saved from the hermitage of the Grotte, holds eighty incunabula and four hundred and thirty-four editions of the fifteen hundreds, and the historic communal archive keeps the land registers of the fourteen and the fifteen hundreds. But what Cupramontana lives on is the vine: it is a centre of production of Verdicchio dei castelli di Jesi, and the fertility the Piceni asked of their goddess is the thing these hills go on giving. Its museum is a museum of wine labels, gathered from every part of the world, the oldest of them from the beginning of the eighteen hundreds, and since 2016 it has stood with the town's other collections inside the MIG, the museums in the caves.