Fiastra

Fiastra is a scattered comune in the mountains of the Macerata province, with its town hall at Trebbio and the lake that bears its name close by; since the first of January 2017 it also takes in the former comune of Acquacanina, now one of its hamlets. On the hill of San Paolo stands the Magalotti castle, the old Castrum Flastrae, raised before the ninth century with the concentric defences of Lombard military engineering: by the sixteenth century it covered twenty-one thousand square metres, and it stopped growing when gunpowder made those walls pointless.

The castle was the seat of one of the four «brevi» into which the comune was divided, each with its own statutes and regulations. The statutes themselves were set down in Gothic Latin in 1436, in four books, and in 1643 another forty-nine chapters were added: the manuscripts are kept in the municipal museum. The church of San Paolo, rebuilt by the Magalotti in Romanesque form, has an oddity you notice as soon as you step inside: the columns on the right are of brick, while those on the left and the apses are of squared white stone alternating with blocks of pink limestone. The polyptych that stood on the high altar, signed by Antonio Sparapane of Norcia, was stolen in 1904.