Mogliano

In the church of Santa Maria in Piazza there is an altarpiece by Lorenzo Lotto, and Mogliano knows exactly what it cost. It was commissioned in 1547 by the mayor of the village, Jacomo Boninfante, for a hundred and thirty gold scudi to be paid in instalments — and the price included the gilded wooden frame as well, made by a «Bartolomeo intaiador de San Cassano». The picture, a Madonna in glory with the saints John the Baptist, Anthony of Padua, Mary Magdalene and Joseph, was finished in 1548 and handed over to the community by Durante Nobili, Lotto's friend and pupil. The frame is still here too, in the sacristy next door, though the painting no longer sits in it. Nobili stayed on in this village far longer than his master did: an altarpiece of his is in San Gregorio Magno, another at the former monastery of Santa Colomba, signed and dated, and in that one, besides the manner of his friend and master, he seems also to remember Antonio Solario's altarpiece at Osimo. Mogliano has one Lotto and three Nobili.

From the end of the twelve hundreds to the middle of the thirteen hundreds the castle belonged to the lords who took their name from the village, the da Mogliano: from the noble Fildesmido to the more famous Gentile, who in 1345 became lord of Fermo and ruled the city until the arms of cardinal Albornoz defeated him. The Albornoz reform included Mogliano in the district of Fermo, of which it was one of the greater castles; in 1569 pope Pius V granted it autonomy, and in 1578 it went back under the rule of Fermo. Nine years. Then something odd: in 1744, for having favoured the Austrian troops marching south, Mogliano was declared a city by a diploma of the queen of Hungary — a village of the Papal State given its title by a foreign sovereign for letting an army through. Outside, where the road for Montegiorgio crosses the one for Francavilla d'Ete, there was a votive aedicule with a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century fresco to which people attributed wonders; the bishop of Fermo decided to build a church there in place of the crumbling aedicule, and the first stone was laid on the eleventh of November 1579. Inside, at the crossing of the transept, they raised a small square temple in the manner of Loreto, and its façade has a grate: through it you can see the fresco the whole church was built for.