Monte Urano

Between the eleventh and the thirteenth century this town won its communal autonomy, breaking away from the duchy of Fermo. Then it gave it back: it handed itself over again, of its own accord, to its old masters. It is a dry sentence in the sources, but it says something rare, because autonomy is usually defended with weapons and not returned. Later the town suffered a disastrous sack at the hands of the inhabitants of Sant'Elpidio a Mare, and the one who rebuilt it, in 1445, was Francesco Sforza. Of the medieval castle there remain the circuit walls, a defensive tower on a polygonal base and two quadrangular bastions; the old town is entered under the arch surmounted by the clock tower, or through the gate called del Baluardo, with its pointed arch. The name is a compound: Monte plus a predial formation from the Latin personal name Uria; others, reading it as Monturano, have proposed a reference to Turan, the Etruscan Venus, or to the Latin taurus, the bull.

The little Romanesque church of Santa Maria Apparente, instead, is dated by an absence: it does not appear in the list of churches of the diocese of Fermo that paid the extraordinary tithes imposed by pope Nicholas the Fourth between 1290 and 1292, and therefore in those years it had not yet been built. The records of the pastoral visitations then tell the rest. That of 1574 orders that in that church the walls be plastered and whitewashed, but leaving the images of the saints untouched; the inventory of an eighteenth-century visitation describes it entirely: the covered portico in front, inside a single altar with the statue of the Madonna, and a field of canes belonging to the church. The whole roof collapsed in 1965, and the building was restored at the end of the nineteen-nineties. The parish church of San Michele Arcangelo, neoclassical, was designed by Giovanni Battista Carducci and completed by Giuseppe Sacconi. And the railway station that bears the town's name, on a line long since closed, is not in the town at all: it stands in the comune of Fermo.