Monte San Pietrangeli

The name this village carries today is the name of a liberation. In 1276 the men of Fermo burned it, and in those years it was called San Pietro de Alleis; in 1444, after driving back the attempts of Francesco Sforza to subdue it, it made itself a free comune, and in 1483 it gave itself a statute of its own. But the freedom did not last: in 1535 it was ceded to Fermo again. On 29 September 1537, by the will of pope Paul III, it was loosed for good from the Fermo yoke and passed directly under the Holy See — and on that occasion it changed its name, becoming Mons Sancti Petri Angelorum, whence Monte San Pietrangeli. Later Pius V assigned it to the province of Macerata, where it stayed until 1808.

The church of Saints Lawrence and Blaise, opened for worship in 1824, is a neoclassical masterpiece built to a design by Giuseppe Valadier, and the man who frescoed its interior was Luigi Fontana, painter and sculptor who at Monte San Pietrangeli was born and is buried. In the council chamber of the town hall there is instead a marble cinerary urn, found in 1775 at the locality of San Biagio: it held the ashes of the legionary Caius Vettius, standard-bearer of the fourth Macedonian legion. The village's calendar has two dates that do not explain themselves: on Easter Monday they hold the feast of Mammaussu, which is the dialect corruption of Emmaus, and in the last week of June the Palio di San Pietro, with the costumed contest between the three quarters of San Pietro, San Lorenzo and Santa Maria. The trade that holds up the economy, besides farming, is shoemaking.