Monsampolo del Tronto

In 2003, during restoration work on the crypt beneath the parish church of Maria Santissima Assunta, more than thirty mummified human bodies were brought to light. Most of them are natural mummies, preserved by a spontaneous process: the microclimate of the crypt dried the bodies out, while in one case an anthropogenic mummification was observed instead, obtained by a surgical procedure of evisceration. The extraordinary thing, though, is not the bodies: it is the clothes. The garments were made of hemp, linen and broom, vegetable fibres that normally rot away completely, and here they survived thanks to the basic pH of the walls — whereas wool and silk, which normally do survive, were fibres these people could not afford. What has come down to us, in other words, is the clothing of the poor, which is exactly the clothing that usually disappears: women's dresses, men's waistcoats, stockings, caps, shirts.

There is another detail worth telling: the bodies had been buried in their best clothes, their festival ones. Poor as you like, but full of details — little buttons, lace, embroidery — and reconstructed where necessary, philologically, by the textile restorers of La Congrega and by the costume historian Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols. In the crypt museum, along with the bodies and the clothes, there are the rosaries, the medals, the rings and the other objects found in the excavation. The village stands on a hill hard by the Salaria, on the left bank of the Tronto, and its name comes from a saint: Monti Sancti Pauli in the year 1100, after the titular of the first castle church, then Monte Santo Polo and finally, by contraction, Monsampolo. On the arms there are three hills rising from the sea, and originally the apostle Paul stood on the three hills; the water is the Tronto. Much further back, Mycenaean pottery has been found here: the mouths of the Tronto must have been a landing place and a sorting centre for amber, the fossil resin that came all the way from the Baltic and left again from here for the markets of the whole Mediterranean.