Serra San Quirico

From a distance Serra San Quirico looks like a ship: a vessel of stone with its prow over the valley of the Esino, according to the image traditionally credited to Annibal Caro, the man of letters who put the Aeneid into Italian and who stayed here at length — while writing about the town letters of a satirical and burlesque turn. The shape comes from the citadel the Church had built in the fourteenth century: in 1374 the Cassero, the watch and defence tower, and the ring of walls strengthened by twelve towers were finished. Along those walls run the Copertelle, covered passages that are the most distinctive thing in the old centre. The defences, though, were not enough: in 1444 Francesco Sforza took the town by storm.

For centuries, here, people worked saltpetre. From the fifteenth century many of the townspeople refined it to make gunpowder, and the trade lasted well beyond the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy: at the castle of Sasso there was a good gunpowder factory. In the seventeenth century, when the reform of the Papal State revoked the town's statutes and the time of the communal liberties ended, down in the valley, near the Esino, the little church of the Madonna di Loreto was raised to shelter travellers about to cross the Gola della Rossa, then full of brigands: around that church grew the quarter now called Borgo Stazione, and in 1865 the first train of the Ancona to Rome line passed through it. In the baroque church of Santa Lucia, with its bell tower ending in an onion dome, there are the Stories of Saint Lucy by Pasqualino de Rossi, a canvas attributed to Guido Reni and a Madonna with saints by the Cavalier d'Arpino.