Apiro

The name comes from the Latin ad pirum, «by the pear tree»: in all probability a pear tree that served as a landmark, and that the village put in its arms, fruited in gold on a blue field. The most remarkable thing in Apiro, though, it owes to one of its own people. Giovanni Giacomo Baldini, born here at the end of the sixteenth century, went to Rome and became personal physician to cardinal Scipione Borghese, to pope Urban VIII and to pope Innocent X; in 1632 he had the church of Sant'Urbano on the main square rebuilt, had it raised to a collegiate and filled it with gifts and bequests. Inside there are an organ by Gaetano Callido of 1771 and canvases by Valentin de Boulogne, by Andrea Lilli and by lo Spagnoletto: paintings one does not expect in a village of two thousand people.

The oldest building is instead the church of San Francesco, earlier than the twelfth century, remade in the eighteenth but with its thirteenth-century Romanesque-Byzantine portal still in place: the carving shows the four evangelists according to the tetramorph, with John's eagle on the left, Mark's lion on the right, Matthew's angel in the middle and, above, a falcon seizing a calf, that is the sacrifice, for Luke. A little outside the village stands the abbey of Sant'Urbano, consecrated in 1086 but older than the year one thousand, Romanesque-Gothic, with three naves and three apses. The town hall, once the palace of the Priors, was raised in 1246 and keeps the polyptych that Allegretto Nuzi painted in 1366. The Mestica theatre opened in 1903. And in the hamlet of Coldigioco, since 1992, there is a geological observatory founded by Alessandro Montanari and his wife, the New York artist Paula Metallo, inside an old school: students and researchers come to it from half the world.