Monteprandone

The coat of arms of Monteprandone, in use since the fifteenth century, brings together five hills, and each has a name: Monteprandone, Monterone, Montetinello, Monticello and Montecretaccio. It is not an ornament, it is a list: between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the circuit of walls took in three neighbouring rises, and that became the shape of the town. The fifth hill, though, tells a story that ends badly. By a bull of the thirteenth of May 1323 pope John XXII granted Ascoli in perpetual fief the strip of land between the Tronto and the Ragnola, out of spite against rebellious Fermo, and on that occasion Montecretaccio passed under Monteprandone: beneath that hill would later grow the maritime landing of Porto d'Ascoli. In 1935 a royal decree detached Porto d'Ascoli and gave it to San Benedetto del Tronto, which needed room. The coat of arms goes on counting five hills.

The oldest document naming the town is of August 1039: two men, Guido and Longino, described as brothers, gave the village and the church of San Nicola to the abbey of Farfa, in the Sabina. The monks held the lordship until 1292, when it was the population itself that resolved to place itself under the protection of the free comune of Ascoli. As a rural community of the Ascoli contado, Monteprandone could not have a patriciate of its own; in exchange the local ordinance let it choose its own podestà, drawing him from a shortlist of three Ascoli nobles: it could not have nobles, but it could decide which noble governed it. The walls, ovoid in plan and reinforced at the base with scarped masonry to withstand the first bombards, were updated over time against the raids of the Ottoman fleet and the incursions of the uscocchi; they also held out in the siege of 1557 led by the duke of Alba, viceroy of Naples.