On this coast they have been changing horses for two thousand years. The finds at the marina suggest a Roman mutatio, that is a change-station along the ancient coast road; and on the same road there still stands the Mandracchio, a fifteenth-century building that remains as evidence of the old post house, where horses were changed. The marina, for that matter, was once called Case Bruciate, burnt houses, and it was the northern boundary of the republic of Ancona: the fortifications there make sense within the defensive system of the Ancona castles. Further inland, Montemarciano and Cassiano had castles, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the one in the capoluogo was a vicariate first of the Malatesta, of Romagna origin, and then of the Piccolomini, from Siena, who held it in the name of the Papal State; from that time the ancient statutes survive. After the two years 1591-1593, when the rule of duke Ercole Sfondrati ended, the town went back under the direct control of the Church, entrusted to the Apostolic Chamber until unification.
The churches here tell above all who paid. The sanctuary of Nostra Signora dei Lumi was built in the fifteenth century by Giacomo Piccolomini, then vicar of Montemarciano, together with his wife Cristofora Colonna, around a fresco of the Madonna nursing the Child: earlier they called her the Madonna of the Oak, from an old image on canvas fixed to an oak trunk. In the church of the Santissimo Sacramento, instead, there is an organ recorded from 1788: five benefactors bought it from the reverend mothers of Santa Maria Nuova in Ancona for a hundred and fifty scudi, and other benefactors took on the cost of building the loft and having it mounted. In the parish church of San Pietro Apostolo there is another, a Callido of the early nineteenth century. Down at the marina, a few metres from the sea and right in front of the water, stand instead the sheds of the former Montecatini works, a fertiliser factory of the first half of the twentieth century closed in 1990: they are still there, awaiting clean-up and recovery.
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📅 Every year, on 2 May; on Good Friday the statue of the Dead Christ parades
Montemarciano celebrates Saint Macarius on 2 May. On Good Friday, a procession is held with the statue of the Dead Christ, kept in the Church of the Santissimo Sacramento, built on a previous 16th-century church and rebuilt in 1766.
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Outside Montemarciano, but an easy day trip away.
