The village sits on the top of a hill eight kilometres from the sea, and from up there you see everything: the Adriatic on one side, the Sibillini mountains on the other, in between the valley of the Ete and that of the Aso. Its position, for centuries, was both its fortune and its trouble. Founded by the Piceni between the sixth and the fifth century before Christ, under Rome it held the title of urbs, that is a city proper, with the pomerium consecrated to the gods and not merely walls. In the twelfth century it was a free comune under the name of Urbiano, and from then on Fermo, which wanted that hill, tried for about two centuries to take it and never managed. It fell only when Francesco Sforza arrived, in 1433, taking advantage of the difficulties of pope Eugene IV; it was Sforza who gave it, ten years later, the castle walls one still sees, with the Porta del Pero and the Porta San Basso. In its best years, inside those walls, five thousand people lived: more than twice as many as the whole comune counts today.
Of the past the churches remain, and they are many: Santi Giovanni Battista ed Evangelista of 1238, with its naves divided by round arches and its trussed roof; Santi Stefano e Vincenzo, eleventh century, the oldest, Romanesque, with brick columns and sandstone capitals; and Santa Maria dell'Olmo, which takes its name from a centuries-old elm grown beside it, Romanesque outside and neo-Gothic inside after prior Luigi De Angelis decided to remake it, with a crypt of cross vaults. In Santa Maria dei Letterati are kept a canvas and three small panels by Vincenzo Pagani, a Renaissance painter born here. Then there is a part of the village that the inhabitants call «Le Spiagge»: there stood the ghetto, with the synagogue and the underground passages, and there leads also the resolution of the sixth of September 1547, when the town council, deep in debt, put on record in Latin that the bones of the Comune would not be devoured by the Jews. A sentence that tells clearly the climate of those years.
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📅 Every year, on 10 September
Monterubbiano celebrates Saint Nicholas of Tolentino on 10 September, in the town that was the birthplace of painter Vincenzo Pagani.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Monterubbiano, but an easy day trip away.
