Cingoli

The name comes from the Latin cingulum, something that girds: the town is built on the top of a mountain in such a way as to gird it. It stands at a little over six hundred metres, and from its belvedere, on clear days, the eye takes in almost the whole of the Marche and reaches beyond the Adriatic to the Croatian heights; for this it is called the balcony of the Marche, and in 2026 it was proclaimed the finest of the villages. A legend has it that the Picene woodpecker, arriving in these lands, alighted on this very height. In Roman times the place was enlarged and fortified by Titus Labienus, who was born here and was Caesar's lieutenant in Gaul, and who paid for it out of his own pocket; Caesar, for his part, names the town in the De bello civili. After the Gothic and Lombard devastations the settlement moved further west, onto the summit where it stands today.

In 1370 the Church granted the comune the right to judge civil and criminal cases, with three exceptions: heresy, lèse-majesté and homicide. The loyalty did not last. In 1375 the cities of the Papal State rebelled against Gregory XI in the war known as that of the Eight Saints, and on that occasion the Guelph family of the Cima made itself felt again: in those very months Masio Cima held the office of podestà in Florence, and it was precisely Florentine military support that let his people seize Cingoli in December of that year. The sons of Tanarello Cima entered the town, drove out the Bolognese podestà and replaced the banners with their own. There followed excommunication for five of them and an interdict on the town, revoked only with the peace of 1378. In 1987 a dam on the Musone created the Castreccioni reservoir, which bears the name of one of the three castles of the medieval contado.