Cupra Marittima

In the ninth century the Moors destroyed the Roman town that stood on the shore, and the people of Cupra went up: out of that flight came three castles on three hills, Castrum Maranum, Castel Sant'Andrea and Castel Boccabianca. In 1076 Marano became a free comune under the protection of Fermo, and the tax it had to pay for that protection was one ox and one sow a year. From up there its men traded with Venice, Chioggia, Sebenico, Durazzo — and yet for the whole of the Middle Ages the marina was not inhabited: sailors and fishermen kept house in the upper village and went down only to work. It is in the second half of the eighteen hundreds that the shore fills up: public lighting and the railway arrive, the Marina borough takes shape, and the comune moves its seat down from the high village to the sea. Piazza della Libertà still keeps the arrangement given it by the architect Vespignani, with the great flight of steps that buttresses the church above; the clock turret on the town hall is a design of Sacconi's.

In that same movement the village took back a name that was not its own but the place's: on the eighteenth of December 1862 Marano became Cupra Marittima, from the goddess Cupra, a Picene divinity the Romans went on worshipping — her altar stood at the centre of the ancient forum. Cupra was the Roman colony down by the sea, in the ager cuprensis, living on oil, olives and a port whose moorings and whose amphorae for grain and oil have come back to light. The temple was built in the age of Augustus and remade almost entirely under Hadrian, who restored the sanctuary in 127: and on that occasion the fine frescoes of the cella, in the third Pompeian style, were pulled down and buried inside the new podium, where the excavations of 2022 found them. The passage from the goddess to the new religion has a building of its own, the pieve of San Basso, of the ninth century, which long held the body of the martyr who is the patron of the town. Not far off, at Boccabianca, lie the oldest worked stones and animal bones in the Marche: there were people here a hundred and thirty thousand years ago. The other Cupra, the one in the mountains, had taken its name back a year earlier.