Montegranaro

The name of Montegranaro comes from grain: mons Granarius, the hill of the store. But what made the town's fortune came much later and cannot be eaten. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth a man by the name of Granatelli began to produce the chiochiera, a kind of cloth slipper with a sole cut from horsehide. From the slipper they moved to the leather shoe, and from there to one of the most important footwear districts in Italy: in a comune of a little over twelve thousand people the work is almost all there, among medium and large firms making shoes and accessories. It shows in church too: on the wooden altars of San Serafino, beside Saint Lawrence, are painted Saints Crispin and Crispinian, the patrons of shoemakers. Out in the fields, meanwhile, many houses of raw earth remain standing and still well kept.

Outside the old walls there is a church that has become the cellar of another. It is called Sant'Ugo, it is spoken of as a crypt but it is not one: it is a Romanesque building datable to around the year eight hundred, with a single nave and a barrel vault, dedicated to Saints Philip and James; when a new church was built higher up on the ridge, the successive enlargements ended by swallowing it, and the old church found itself underneath, turned in effect into a false crypt. Inside there are three cycles of frescoes from different periods, and the oldest is dated exactly to 1299: its author has no name, and art historians call him the master of Montegranaro. The town, for that matter, has an eventful history: excommunicated by cardinal Albornoz in 1354 and again in 1442, in 1394 it fell into the hands of a soldier of fortune and was then sold to Fermo in exchange for his release.