Maiolati Spontini

In the fourteen hundreds this castle was the stronghold of the fraticelli, Franciscans who preached absolute poverty and held that pope John XXII and those who came after him had taught heresy about the poverty of the Church: they therefore considered themselves, and only themselves, the true Church. Martin V declared the sect heretical, sent two inquisitors who are saints today, John of Capestrano and James of the Marches, and then, in June 1428, ordered the rector of the March to destroy the castle of Maiolati. The survivors took refuge in the villages round about; two years later they were allowed to rebuild the settlement, under precise guarantees, and without walls. The fraticelli carried on in secret all the same, and were discovered and tried in 1466.

Maiolati belonged to Jesi, and Jesi saw to it that this was not forgotten: in 1504 it ordered its castles to set above their entrance gate a relief of the rampant lion, and imposed on them the duty of carrying the palio every year to the church of San Floriano, on the saint's day. The custom lasted three centuries, until 1807; and the lion is still in the comune's arms. In 1774 Gaspare Spontini was born here, who became a composer in Paris and in Berlin; in 1939 the village added his name to its own, and in the parish church there is a carved wooden choir loft that was his gift, taken from a church in Ancona that no longer exists. Most of the people of this comune, however, do not live up here: they live down at Moie, beside the abbey.