Offida stands on a rocky spur cut out by the two source branches of the Lama torrent, between the valley of the Tesino and that of the Tronto. At the western end of the town, with ravines on three sides, is Santa Maria della Rocca: a great brick building in Romanesque-Gothic that a master Albertino raised in 1330 over a small Benedictine church that was already there. Underneath, though, there is another one: the crypt has the same surface as the church above it, and it is frescoed — the painter the historians call the Master of Offida worked in both. The name of the town is disputed: in medieval documents it appears as Ofida, Ophida, Aufida, and from that last form a link has been thought of with Aufidena, or with the gens Aufidia; the idea that it comes from the Greek óphis, serpent, is held to be pure fancy. The theatre of Offida, however, is called the Serpente Aureo, the golden serpent — and in 2026 it was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO together with nine other theatres of central Italy.
There is no certain historical trace until 578, when the people of Ascoli, fleeing the Lombard invasion, founded several castles on the Picene hills, and Offida was one of them. The first sure document is of 1039: Longino d'Azone gives the castle of Ophida to the abbey of Farfa, and from Farfa the place would be governed for centuries, inside a presidato that answered to no diocese. In the wars between Ascoli and Fermo the people of Offida sided with Fermo; in 1831 Gregory XVI raised Offida to the rank of city. But what the town has chosen to remember of the last war is not the bridges the Germans blew up as they withdrew: it is a family. In 1942 the Venturas, Greek Jewish refugees, arrived here under forced residence, and the Talamonti hid them and saved them from deportation. On the nineteenth of November 1979 the Yad Vashem institute of Jerusalem recognised as Righteous Among the Nations Adelino Talamonti and his son Fides, and Camillo Talamonti and his children Fernando and Emma: six people of one household, for one family they did not let anybody take away.
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📅 Every year, on 6 November; Good Friday brings the procession of the bara
Offida celebrates Saint Leonard of Noblac on 6 November. On Good Friday, the statue of the dead Christ is carried in procession on the «bara», a finely decorated canopied float.
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 Offida, but an easy day trip away.
