Altidona

The first castle of Altidona ended up in the sea. It was called San Biagio in Barbolano, and in the early Middle Ages it sank, or perhaps the people of Altidona pulled it down themselves: the source gives both versions. After the twelfth century the inhabitants made themselves another one, on the hill where the village stands today, around the parish of Santa Maria e San Ciriaco; in 1507 it appears under Fermo as a second-class castle. The medieval walls are still standing, and so is the Belvedere, the watchtower that looks over the valley of the Aso. In the eighteenth-century presbytery there is a polyptych by Cortese of 1390 with the Madonna enthroned among saints, and in the parish church a panel attributed to Vincenzo Pagani. In the contrada of Barbolano, where the lost castle stood, Villa Montana and a Roman cistern remain.

Altidona is the village of the kiln men. There were kilns here already in Roman times, but the trade was born in the nineteenth century: at Marina, Raffaele Bagalini began making bricks and by 1880 had two plants working; in 1890, along the strada Aprutina, he built one of the Hoffmann type, among the first kilns in Italy to fire continuously instead of in batches. Bagalini died at fifty-six, on 23 December 1898, run over by a trolley inside one of his own kilns, and he left his workmen a trade that they passed on to their sons: in the first half of the twentieth century more than a hundred kiln men lived in the old centre, nearly all of them fuochisti, the ones who regulate the temperature of the fire. Until the sixties they were called from half of Italy and from Germany to direct production and to build kilns; one of them, Antonio Nepi, patented in 1931 a way of loading bricks that saved fuel. In July the village holds their feast.