Camerino

Camerino has had a university since 1336, and that is what it lives on: it employs more than a thousand people directly, and over the years it has taken the buildings one after another — the ducal palace of the Da Varano is the law faculty, and departments and libraries sit inside the former convents and the old palaces. The place is very old: as Camerinum it became an ally of Rome in the fourth century before Christ, and with a foedus aequum, a treaty between equals, and two cohorts of Camertes fought with Marius against the Cimbri. In 1256 the troops of Manfred besieged and destroyed it, killing much of the population; those who had fled came back six years later behind Gentile da Varano, whose family then ruled for three centuries. One of them had a wall twelve kilometres long built around the city.

This city has been knocked down more than once. The earthquake of 1799 destroyed the Romanesque-Gothic cathedral, which was rebuilt at the start of the eighteen hundreds; the one of 1997 damaged much of the rest, and it was during those restorations that Giambattista Tiepolo's Apparition of the Virgin to San Filippo Neri — the only painting by the Venetian in the whole of central Italy — went back to the church it had been painted for. Then, on 26 October 2016, two shocks an hour and a half apart brought the town to its knees: the whole historic centre became a single red zone, the largest of the entire earthquake area, and the ducal palace, which is to say the university, partly came down. The designs are finished now and the work in the historic centre is beginning.