The name comes from a man. Around the eighth century Charlemagne sent one of his vicars, Marchio Gallo, to govern here; he built himself a castle on the summit of the mountain and called it Mons Sanctae Mariae in Gallo, and from that name came the name of the whole territory. From 1039 to 1572 the village lay under the abbey of Farfa, five centuries with the same master. Then the castle began to empty: in 1580 thirteen families still lived there, along with the town hall and the priest's house; by the mid seventeenth century it was a heap of rubble, and the people had built themselves a new village lower down, Balzo, which is today the seat of the comune.
On the thirtieth of October 2016, at twenty to eight in the morning, the strongest shock recorded in Italy since 1980 made almost the whole comune uninhabitable. Two months earlier there had already been another, without victims but with enormous damage; after the October one the inhabitants were all taken away, to hotels along the Adriatic coast. Santa Maria in Pantano also collapsed, a very old church that held frescoes by Martino Bonfini. Before all this the village had already lost its people to emigration: from more than three thousand inhabitants to a few hundred.
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📅 Every year, on 20 May
On 20 May Montegallo, a municipality of 573 inhabitants in the province of Ascoli Piceno, celebrates its patron Saint Bernardino of Siena, to whom one of the town's churches is dedicated.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Montegallo, but an easy day trip away.
