Osimo

The people of Osimo are «the headless ones»: in the atrium of the town hall stands the Lapidarium, and the Roman statues gathered there — figures in togas and in heroic semi-nudity — are all without heads. Hence the most self-mocking nickname in the Marche. Under the town, though, there is far more: a dense network of galleries and tunnels cut into the sandstone on several levels, linked by shafts with footholds. Of these caves there are almost no documents, and the source explains why: they were hiding places and escape routes, and secrecy was what an entire community's survival hung on. Some carried water, some are circular halls perhaps used for rites or meetings, others were dwellings. In the Simonetti caves are the symbols of the Templars, who were at Osimo from 1167 to 1317, and the eight-pointed cross of the knights of Malta; under palazzo Campana, two galleries have walls and vaults covered with esoteric reliefs.

Above ground the story is no quieter. In the fifteenth century a condottiero of Osimo, Boccolino di Guzzone, seized the town with the help of its people, and to hold it against the pope went so far as to ask the sultan Bayezid II for support; it was the papal troops of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio who took it back, in 1487. The main square is still called piazza Boccolino. Before him there had been Auximum, a Roman colony on a hill reckoned impregnable, and its spring is one of the few monuments of the Marche described by an ancient historian: Procopius tells how Belisarius built on it his tactic for wresting the town from the Goths. At the Collegio Campana two future popes studied. And in the basilica of San Giuseppe da Copertino — the flying saint, patron of students — you can visit the crypt with his body and the rooms where he spent his last years. The Romanesque-Gothic cathedral stands on the highest point, the Conero is a quarter of an hour away, and the verdicchio of these hills ends up in the glass.