Acquasanta Terme

The name is the water. The sulphur springs of Acquasanta were known already in Roman times: on the Tabula Peutingeriana the place appears as Vicus ad Aquas, and it was a mansio on the Salaria, the road that still crosses here on two Roman bridges, the one at Quintodecimo and the Ponte Romano. Of the ancient baths ruins remain in the hamlet of Santa Maria del Tronto, with a cistern and the remains of the pools: they were destroyed in the barbarian age and rebuilt where the town stands today, and in 1780 Lazzaro Giosaffatti designed a new bathhouse for them. In June 1883, at Santa Maria del Paggese, a terracotta pot turned up by chance with about 275 denarii inside, struck between the second half of the first century and the beginning of the third. The official name, though, is recent: the comune has been called Acquasanta Terme only since 1957.

Before being one comune, Acquasanta was four. From the fourteenth century, under the free comune of Ascoli, the territory was divided into sindicati modelled on the pievanie: Acquasanta with its seat at Luco, Montacuto with its seat at Pomaro, Montecalvo with its seat at San Martino and, later, Quintodecimo. Each had a podestà and a Parlamento Generale, and each its own place to hold it, nearly always in the open: the loggia of the church of San Lorenzo at Paggese for Acquasanta, the palazzo della Comunità for Quintodecimo, the loggia of the church of San Martino for Montecalvo, the space in front of the church of San Lazzaro near Pito for Montacuto. In the sixteenth century they passed to the Papal State. The merger came with the royal decree of 10 December 1865: from the first of January 1866 the comuni of Montacuto, Montecalvo del Castellano, Quintodecimo and Santa Maria were suppressed and put together under Acquasanta as capoluogo. Montecalvo, three years earlier, had had to add «del Castellano» so as not to be confused with other places in the Kingdom.