Castignano

From Castignano comes the oldest Italic inscription found so far. It is the stele of Castignano, a sandstone cippus about a metre high, datable to the seventh or sixth century before Christ, with a boustrophedon text — that is, one that runs one way and then turns back, as the ox does when ploughing — and that text speaks of the sacredness of the boundaries the cippus itself marked. The alphabet used shows influences traced to the Aegean and Anatolian area. The name of the village, instead, would come from a wood of chestnut trees, that Lucus castineanus which Pliny too speaks of. Until the year one thousand the settlement was much bigger than it is now: what reduced it were the landslides, which here have come back more than once.

Even today, in a way, Castignano is a village of boundaries. It sits astride the ridge that divides the valley of the Tronto, to the south, from the Val Tesino, to the north, and that ridge can be heard even in the way people speak: where at Ascoli they say figghje, mogghje, capigghje, here they say fije, moje, capije, and where the people of Ascoli say n'addra vodda, those of Castignano say n'atra vota — but in the hamlets to the south, Ripaberarda and Sant'Angelo, the dialect is practically that of Ascoli. Between 1369 and 1380 the village knew the tyranny of Boffo da Massa, a ghibelline lord who, having exiled his opponents, built himself from 1377 a small lordship right on the border between the states of Fermo and Ascoli, with Carassai, Castignano, Cossignano and Porchia. In 1585 Sixtus V put it under the bishopric of Montalto. Among the trades, the most renowned is the art of lace.