Castel di Lama

Castel di Lama is not a town: it is a mosaic. The comune is divided into Ville, a sort of contrade — Villa Piattoni, Villa Chiarini, Villa Croce, Villa Sambuco and Villa Sant'Antonio the main ones, and then the smaller Villa Cese, Villa Cabbiano, Villa Valentino, Villa Forcella, Collecchio, Tose. It grew that way because in the eighteenth century the seigneurial villas spread across the territory, giving rise to a mosaic development that was called, precisely, the Ville della Lama. And one of those villas is not even wholly here: Villa Sant'Antonio lies partly in this comune and for the rest in that of Ascoli Piceno. The name too has changed as often as the shape: Castrum Lamae in the fourteenth century, Ville della Lama in the sixteenth, simply Lama in the eighteenth, and finally Castel di Lama in 1862, the year after the birth of the Kingdom of Italy, fixed both by a royal decree and by a resolution of the town council. Castel is the castle that stood on the hill overlooking the via Salaria; Lama is the torrent, and the word describes a landslip.

Along the Salaria the ancient milestones of the seventh and the eighth mile can still be seen: the distance from Ascoli, marked in stone. The free comune was born in the fourteenth century, then decayed, and was reborn on the sixth of December 1543; two years later it gave itself its own statutes, and in the following decade it took part in the second war of the Tronto. Later a pope erected the territory into a marquisate, at the request of the Odoardi family. In 1799 the Napoleonic troops shot sixteen fellow citizens who had rebelled, and at Sambuco a plaque still remembers them. From 1926 to 1952 the electric tramway of Offida had its terminus at the railway station, with a route of about ten kilometres. And among the crafts, the one this place is known for well beyond the Marche is lace.