Petritoli

The name is still argued over. The commonest explanation has it born from the fusion of three castles — Petrosa, Petrania and Petrollavia — whose names would have welded into one; others, though, observe that those three names rather indicate three boroughs, with their respective roads, built outside the castle walls. What is certain is that the village was founded in the tenth century by the monks of Farfa, under the name of Castel Rodolfo. In 1055 it passed to the bishop of Fermo; from 1198 it governed itself by its own statutes, until in 1250 Frederick II came and conquered it. From then on periods of autonomy alternated with periods of Fermo's rule, until, under Napoleon, Petritoli became the seat of a canton.

You enter the village passing under three ogival arches of the nineteenth century, flanked by towers that are instead of the fifteenth. The civic tower too is of the nineteenth, and it is a small anthology of shapes: a square rusticated base, an octagonal body, a round crowning. The thing that surprises most, though, is the theatre. It is called the teatro dell'Iride, it was built between 1873 and 1877 to a design by the architect Giuseppe Sabbatini and inaugurated on 20 May 1877: a real theatre, in a village with little more than two thousand five hundred inhabitants. In the church of Santa Maria dei Martiri there is an organ by Callido; palazzo Vitali is in Venetian Gothic style; and in the hamlet of Moregnano a medieval stronghold remains.