Appignano

Outside the village, in the middle of the countryside, stands the convent of Forano, and tradition has it that Saint Francis passed through here. Of that passage, however, no document remains: what remains is a door. Beside the present entrance portal an older one is preserved, with a studded leaf, and it is the only material witness to the Franciscan foundation — everything else has been rebuilt over the centuries. The convent is worth the road that leads there in any case: the church keeps canvases by good hands, and the cloister, with its well in the middle, is the one it has always been. Not far off you can also reach Santa Maria di Almaiano, now reduced to a ruin, where one curious detail is still visible: the internal corners are not corners, they have been rounded off and turned into niches.

The name of the village, according to the most widespread explanation, comes from a Roman proconsul, Aulus Pinianus Faltonius, who is said to have held his estates here. The first serious document, on the other hand, speaks of a Castrum Appignani subject to Osimo in the first decades of the thirteenth century; the autonomous Comune appears around the middle of that same century, and it appears, with a certain irony, precisely in the years when relations with neighbouring Treia were becoming difficult — the independence and the quarrel with the neighbour are documented together. On the square stands the town hall, an eighteenth-century work by Mattia Capponi of Cupramontana. Clay has always been worked here: the village is known for its ceramics and majolica, and every year the workshops stay open for the festival that puts them on show. The other date is the Leguminaria, devoted to pulses — chickpeas, grass peas, beans, lentils — that is, to the food eaten every day in this countryside, cooked in the terracotta pots made in the village.