Colli del Tronto

The coat of arms of Colli del Tronto is one of the most unusual to be found in a comune of three and a half thousand people: on a red field stands Victory, a silver sword in her right hand and a laurel crown in her left, upright upon a walking elephant. Above, in the blue chief, there are a ruined tower with ghibelline crenellations, a vine shoot on the right and a sheaf of wheat ears on the left. The three figures at the top explain themselves — the ruin, the wine, the bread — the elephant does not: the sources describe it and pass no comment. What the territory says about itself, for the rest, lies underground: worked stone tools, a Picene necropolis, Roman tombs.

The church of Santa Felicita was built in 1796 to a design by the Ticinese architect Pietro Maggi, and it counts as a double document: on the one hand it preserves the criteria by which the Franciscans built in the Ascoli country at the beginning of the sixteenth century, on the other it shows how the former Capuchin convent was renewed in the eighteenth. Inside there is a canvas by Ferdinando Cicconi, a painter born here in 1831, and on the gallery above the entrance a pipe organ built in 1888 by Adriano Verati, with a keyboard of fifty-six notes and twenty-five pedals. The village has a stop on the railway between Ascoli Piceno and San Benedetto del Tronto, a lace-making craft known throughout Italy, and a football club that was also born of a merger: Atletico Azzurra Colli, of 2010, puts together the two clubs that existed before.