Monte Roberto

The ancient city lies in the plain, the name on the hill. Down in the flat land, in the territory of the hamlet of Pianello Vallesina, stood Planina, the city Pliny the Elder names in the Naturalis historia, peopled by the tribus Velina: it did not survive the barbarian devastations, but its ruins stayed visible into the nineteenth century. The name went elsewhere, for a legend makes Castelplanio, on the other side of the valley, its heir. The hill, for its part, is called Monte Roberto after a man of whom nothing is known but the name: a dominus loci, a lay feudatory probably of Lombard origin, recalled in the document of 1079 that names the place for the first time. In contrada Noceto, in 1881, a Picene necropolis of the sixth century before Christ came to light, and the finds are today in the National Archaeological Museum of the Marche, in Ancona.

Then the row of sieges begins. In 1137 the village repulsed the emperor Lothair, in 1167 Frederick Barbarossa as well; in 1219 it was taken into the contado of Jesi, and with Jesi it ended up in the Papal State. In 1354 the bands of Fra Moriale besieged and sacked it, to punish it for having sided with the Visconti in order to keep its autonomy, and it was cardinal Egidio Albornoz, sent by the pope to win back the papal lands, who took it again. In 1433 the troops of Francesco Sforza occupied it; then it belonged to the Malatesta; in 1517 the men of Francesco Maria I Della Rovere sacked it. Meanwhile down in the plain they grew wheat: the fields of Pianello were so many and so good that the place earned the name of granary of the Papal State.