Grottazzolina

The village has changed its name three times, and each time with its master. Around the middle of the tenth century the monks of Farfa built the castle that is the first nucleus of the place and called it Montebello; soon after it passed to the canons of Fermo cathedral, who renamed it Grotta dei Canonici, Crypta Canonicorum; and in the thirteenth century Azzo VII, called Azzolino, having taken the Marca Fermana, gave it the name it still carries. Before all that there were the Piceni: the necropolis dug between 1948 and 1953 shows that people lived here as early as the eighth century before Christ. From the fourteenth century the village was under Fermo; it was made a free comune in 1537, but after ten years pope Paul III put it back under the city, and from 1600 it was governed, along with forty-seven other castles, by podestà and vicars sent from Fermo.

Oliverotto Euffreducci, lord of Fermo, fortified Grottazzolina and set up a cannon foundry here: from that, they say, comes the village's passion for gunshots, for the tonanti and then for the fireworks that still close the patronal feast. Two of its mayors are worth naming: the baritone Francesco Graziani, who held the office between 1895 and 1901, and Vincenzo Monaldi, mayor in the twenties until fascism forced him out of political life, later the first minister of health of the Italian Republic. The church of the Santissimo Sacramento e Rosario was built with the bequest of Alfonso Verzieri, a townsman who in the seventeenth century left his goods to enlarge the cramped church of Santa Petronilla; behind its altarpiece stands a wooden Madonna of 1612 by the Neapolitan sculptor Aniello Stellato.