Sirolo

Beneath Sirolo lies the largest Picene necropolis in the Marche, of the sixth century before Christ, and it is the only one in the region that can be visited. From it comes the so-called Tomb of the Queen, a burial with almost two thousand objects of grave goods: a quantity that cannot be explained unless one grants that this community gave women a far higher place than is usually imagined for ancient Italy. It is not the only layer: Monte Conero and its slopes have been inhabited since the remotest times — traces a hundred thousand years old are spoken of — and then came the Neolithic people, those of the Bronze Age, the Piceni, the Greeks and the Romans. It was the Greeks who called the mountain Komaros; the Romans made it Cumerium, that is strawberry tree, because in October the Conero fills with those red fruits.

The name of the village, on the other hand, would be that of a man: the commander Sirius, in the following of Belisarius, to whom around 540 Justinian is said to have given this territory after the defeat of the Goths in the Picenum. The castle that grew from it was never taken, and it keeps the Gothic arch of 1050 that served as its gate; in 1225 the counts Cortesi, who were its lords, ceded it to Ancona in exchange for a noble title — which is why Sirolo is one of the Castles of Ancona. Today the village has eight beaches beneath the cliff, and the most famous is that of the Due Sorelle, closed to the north by two sea stacks and reachable only from the sea, to which in 2011 the post office devoted a stamp. Two of those beaches, the Sassi Neri and the Due Sorelle, are deliberately left without services, to keep them as natural as possible.