Santa Maria Nuova

On the arms of this hill village, granted by royal decree of 31 July 1884, there is a red cross on a silver field: it is the cross of Milan, and it is there to recall the Lombard immigrants who in 1472 founded the borgo of Santa Maria. Beside the cross are bees, put there to speak of the industriousness of the local people. It is a rare and rather fine case: a comune of the Marche keeping on its shield the sign of a northern city, not for ownership or dependence, but out of gratitude towards people who had arrived from outside and stayed. In older times the village was not even called this: its name was Santa Maria delle Ripe.

As a comune, on the other hand, Santa Maria Nuova is young: on 10 May 2008 it celebrated a hundred and fifty years of its independence from Jesi, the city in whose territory it had been included. The chronology says something on its own — a quarter of a century after separating, the village gives itself a coat of arms, and in that same 1884 it consecrates the church of Sant'Antonio di Padova, while the older church of San Giuseppe goes back to the eighteenth century. In the end it behaved like a place that, having just become its own master, was building the objects one needs in order to be so. Today the sports centre, with its skating rink, has hosted European championships in the past: for a village of a few thousand people, lying on the inland hills between Jesi, Osimo and Filottrano, that is no small thing.