Ripatransone

Ripatransone stands on top of the ridge that divides the valley of the Tesino from that of the Menocchia, at almost five hundred metres and a dozen kilometres from the Adriatic, with the slope falling away sheer on three sides. The name is made of two pieces: Ripa is the medieval form for crag, and Transone is the name of the founder of the ripano castles. The more attractive hypothesis — Ripa trans Asonem, the crag beyond the Aso — was already refuted in 1827, when the historian Vicione pointed out its geographical and linguistic incongruity: the Aso, quite simply, is not where it would have to be. The hill was inhabited from the Neolithic, and on its top Umbrians and Picenes followed one another; in the ninth century four castles arose there, Monte Antico, Capodimonte, Roflano and Agello, and from their unification the town was born, which in 1198 took the name it bears today. It was an almost impregnable stronghold in the struggles against the neighbouring cities, so much so that it earned the title of Propugnaculum Piceni: it was rarely taken, and from the most important capture, by Francesco Sforza, it freed itself a year later, in 1445, at the battle of Santa Prisca.

Under the town, though, there is emptiness. An intricate system of artificial tunnels of prehistoric age, which here they call the caves of Santità, cuts across the built-up area for its whole width and would extend nearly two thousand square metres; it was closed in 1967. The urban ground has given way more than once, and the most memorable collapse is that of piazza Matteotti: on the night of the tenth of August 1994 the square sank and beneath it came to light the remains of a church, San Biagio in Piazza, which had been demolished in 1660. Round about, the hills of Ripatransone are of limestone, sand, clay and sandstone, and they are cut by the calanchi, the furrows of rain erosion that give the landscape a lunar look. Ripatransone obtained its definitive autonomy from Fermo in 1571, when pope Pius V constituted it as a City and a Diocese; from then on the municipal government stayed in the hands of a few families, who took shape as a civic nobility. Until the nineteen-fifties the town came close to nine thousand inhabitants, then it emptied quickly, and the bleeding stopped only at the end of the twentieth century.