Montegiorgio

Near the bridge over the Tenna that leads to Belmonte Piceno there is a row of sixty bald cypresses, the swamp cypress, which is an American tree: they are the only specimens in the whole of the Marche. They were planted, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by a member of the Passari family, who then owned that land, and it is told that he put them there for an American woman who was homesick for the trees of her own country. The biggest of them are over thirty metres tall, and the Region has listed them as a monumental vegetal formation. Beside the cypresses is the Cascata del Sasso: great boulders wedged in the bend of the river had made a fall of water that calmed the current and formed a sort of pond below, and there the women came to do their washing until the nineteen fifties. Then the post-war years brought embankments and bridges that narrowed the river and quickened the water: the fall became much higher and fiercer, they cemented it, and at the end of the seventies the concrete collapsed.

With the neighbouring town of Rapagnano relations were long difficult, and in 1533 a bell came into it. Two had been cast, one for the church of San Giovanni of Montegiorgio and one for the church of San Giovanni of Rapagnano: the people of Rapagnano took by force the one meant for Montegiorgio as well, and the discord grew. Montegiorgio did count for something: in the Egidian Constitutions of 1357 it was reckoned as important as Pesaro and Macerata among the lands of the Church. Of the church of San Salvatore, pulled down in 1827, only the fourteenth-century portal is left standing, and other pieces — the sacristy — are in rooms under the school, with the entrance beside the post office. In the church of San Francesco, at the top of the town, a Gothic chapel has its walls frescoed by Antonio Alberti da Ferrara around 1425; it stayed open for worship until the middle of the twentieth century, when part of the roof fell in.