Serra de' Conti

The name says exactly what this place is and whose it was: Serra, that is the hill ridge, and de' Conti, from the comital title of those who held it as an imperial fief directly under the marquis of Ancona — probably a branch of the counts della Genga, to which belonged that count Rinaldo della Serra who appears often in thirteenth-century documents. The settlement itself, however, is owed to the Benedictines of the abbey of Santa Croce di Sassoferrato, agrarian colonisers of the upper Misa valley, who between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries built a fortified borgo here. The form «Serra de' Conti» appears for the first time in a document of 1244; just four years later, in 1248, the village signed with the comune of Jesi an agreement that was also a submission, and that would last for centuries.

From then on the history of Serra is the list of those who held it. In 1360 cardinal Albornoz, reorganising the Marca, placed it in the Presidiato of San Lorenzo in Campo together with Jesi, Senigallia, Fano, Urbino and Cagli, and the village reconfirmed its pacts with Jesi «by free choice of alliance», because in some way they protected it. Then came the lordships: the Chiavelli, the counts Buscareto of Senigallia, from 1376 the Atti of Sassoferrato — who in 1390 obtained from Boniface IX the office of papal vicars, with civil and criminal jurisdiction and the right to collect the dues — and for a couple of years Pandolfo III Malatesta. In 1798 it was definitively detached from the republic of Jesi; in 1816 Pius VII made it the seat of a communal government, and in 1817 the seat was suppressed and moved to Montecarotto. One year of autonomy, then under somebody else again.