Matelica

In piazza Enrico Mattei there is a fountain, and people used to run round that fountain for a very precise reason. An old law of the counts Ottoni obliged anyone who had gone bankrupt to make twelve circuits of it shouting: «I have given up my goods and for this let no one ever trust me again». It was a public penalty, and the town has kept it by turning it upside down: today whoever does seven laps of the fountain, walking or running, under the supervision of an official of the Pro Matelica association, is rewarded with the Madman's Licence. The four statues that pour water into the basin face the four cardinal points, and in the town they all have nicknames. Not far off there is vicolo Orfanelle, which everybody calls vicolo Basciafemmine, kiss-the-women alley, because its twisting shape allowed people to slip aside unseen. And at Braccano, the largest hamlet, on the outside walls of the houses, the stables and the haylofts, there are more than fifty murals, painted at different times by students of the academies of Brera, Urbino and Macerata.

The name, on the other hand, nobody can explain, and the source is honest enough to dismantle its own hypotheses one by one: no other places in the world appear to bear it, the Celtic «land of meadows» is called unconvincing, the Greek one still more far-fetched, and the Latin mater liquoris, mother of the waters, does not hold, because no river rises in the territory and because Pliny the Elder already called it Matilica. Recent studies propose a Celtic Mati-lika, a translation of the Picene name Kupra Vepets, good slab of stone. That name, in any case, has proved more durable than the city: Matelica was razed three times — by the Lombards, then in 1174 by the archbishop of Mainz, then again in 1199 by a league led by Camerino, after which the inhabitants lived as fugitives in the mountains until in 1209 the emperor allowed them to rebuild. They called it the New Castle of Sant'Adriano, but the old name came straight back into use. In 1259 the people of Matelica took their revenge by destroying Camerino sixty years after the event; they declared themselves eternally faithful to king Manfred and, when he died, went so far as to imprison a papal ambassador rather than go back on their word.