Acquaviva Picena

The fortress of Acquaviva Picena is among the largest and best preserved defensive complexes in the Marche, and a map explains why: the village stands on the ridge overlooking the valley of the Tronto, a few kilometres from the sea, and from 1341 it belonged to Fermo, which made it its forward garrison in enemy territory — it served to keep the expansion of Ascoli away from Fermo's holdings on the coast. In the fifteenth century the village doubled: to the core huddled around the fortress, still called Terra Vecchia, the Terra Nuova was added to the east, and a second strongpoint facing the shore became necessary. At the end of that same century the fortress was redesigned and rebuilt by Baccio Pontelli to adapt it to firearms, which had just made everything built before it old.

The written memory of the village, by contrast, was lost in a single night. In 1799, during the Napoleonic campaign, the anti-French insurgent militias led by Giuseppe Costantini, known as Sciabolone, put Acquaviva to fire and sword, and with the village the communal archive burned: most of the direct sources of local history no longer exist. A century and a half later the village did the opposite and took people in: after the air raid of 27 November 1943 the Adolfo De Carolis elementary school sheltered more than four thousand displaced people arriving from the nearby coastal town, and in 2008, for the sixty-fifth anniversary, a plaque was placed inside that same school. Outside the walls there is also the convent of San Francesco, the oldest Franciscan settlement of the Marca Fermana, which tradition has founded by Francis himself: today it is decaying and under a protection order.