Patron saint festival
Feast of Saint Septimius
📅 Every year, on 22 September
On 22 September Jesi celebrates Saint Septimius; the city was the birthplace, on 26 December 1194, of the future Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Swabia.
The name is older than Rome: it comes from the same pre-Latin root *ais that lies in the Isonzo and the Isarco, and that gave first the river, the Esino, and then the town. Legend, instead, has it founded by Esio, king of the Pelasgians, landed from Arcadia and come up from the sea: from him the rampant lion of the arms, and perhaps the title of «Città Regia» that Jesi has borne for centuries. But the scene everyone remembers is another: on 26 December 1194, in a tent pitched in the market square, the empress Constance gave birth before witnesses to Frederick II, who filled that title with real privileges and stayed bound to his Jesi all his life.
The walled town can still be walked all the way round: a kilometre and a half of circuit, raised in the fourteenth century on the Roman line and rebuilt in the fifteenth by Baccio Pontelli and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, with four of its seven gates still open. Inside, the picture gallery holds the masterpieces of Lorenzo Lotto, and the Teatro Pergolesi — where on the opening night Rossini's mother sang, to stalls deserted by the nobility for fear of the Jacobins — has been a World Heritage site since 2026. Here in 1472 one of the very first printed editions of the Divine Comedy came off the press. Around, the castelli of Jesi grow Verdicchio, one of the great Italian whites: the cellars can be visited among walled villages.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Jesi 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Jesi
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Jesi, but an easy day trip away.
chiesa di San Donato 📍 Massimino · 9.3 km The parish church of San Donato in the hamlet of San Vincenzo, baroque, built between 1818 and 1820. monastero di Santo Stefano 📍 Millesimo · 14 km Baroque church and fifteenth-century cloister, Cistercian until 1802, now inside a private castle. castello di Millesimo 📍 Millesimo · 15 km Dismantled in 1553 so the French could not take it, the thirteenth-century keep is open again. Castello di Cairo Montenotte 📍 Cairo Montenotte · 20 km The ruins of the Del Carretto castle above Cairo Montenotte, in the upper Bormida valley. Ferrania Film Museum 📍 Cairo Montenotte · 20 km Six themed rooms in Palazzo Scarampi for the plant that made Ferrania a name in world cinema. castello di Dego 📍 Dego · 24 km Ruins at Cua, above the Val Bormida, and a Napoleonic path that climbs up to them.