Pedaso

Pedaso is a village that came down from the hill to the sea because the hill would not stay still. It was a castle of the men of Fermo on the coast, charged with watching the Adriatic from a tower; but at the end of the eighteenth century, because of the continual collapse of the houses along the Cupa, owing to the landslide-prone nature of the hill, people began to build below, along the beach. The castle was taken apart and the village remade on the shore; on that occasion the church of San Trifone, which stood before the main gate, was demolished too. The watchtower, instead, has stayed: since 1877 it has been the lighthouse, it still works and in summer it hosts concerts. Between 1795 and 1797, on the site of the medieval church of Santa Croce, was built what the people of Pedaso call the Chiesolina, plain outside and richly decorated inside; the neogothic parish church, on the other hand, was begun in 1897 and finished in 1929.

The village's calendar begins on the first of May, with the workers' outing on Monte Serrone, the hill behind the built-up area where in autumn people go to pick blackberries and where there is also an astronomical observatory. Then come the summer feasts: the Feast of the Seaman and that of Saint Peter, the patron, when the statue of the saint is carried on a boat and blesses the fishermen, those dead in war and those living. In the four days before the mid-August holiday there is the fair of mussels and spaghetti alla marinara, which has had more than fifty editions. And the underpasses that lead to the beach each carry the name of a songwriter.