Monte San Giusto

Monte San Giusto is what it became when one of its sons made a career. Niccolò Bonafede, born here, was elected bishop of Chiusi, and out of his native town he made a Renaissance court. The fortress-palace that bears his name he began at the start of the sixteenth century: the entrance portal is of 1524, the work of the Ancona stonecutter Franco Pesimoti; the central body, on a pyramidal base, with its brick front, stone frames and windows shaped as a Guelph cross, is modelled on Palazzo Venezia in Rome, while the courtyard is modelled on that of the ducal palace of Urbino. Inside, on the ground floor, there is a painted room they call the Bishop's Room, and on the main floor a frescoed band with the Triumphs of Niccolò Bonafede, attributed to a Spanish painter, Johannes Hispanus: they are the fragments of a much larger decoration. Today the palace is the town hall, and in the council chamber hangs a nineteenth-century painting showing Bonafede examining the design of the palace.

In 1504 pope Julius II made him rector of Santa Maria della Pietà in Telusiano, a church of Romanesque origin just outside the town, and there too Bonafede set to work: he had the ceiling raised, closed the old arched windows and opened others for light, and had his own arms fixed on the stone portal. Then he commissioned from Lorenzo Lotto the Crucifixion, finished in 1531, which is the most important work in the town and is still there. His own tombstone, on the other hand, was lost in the restoration of 1921. In the collegiate church of Santo Stefano there is a wooden Crowned Virgin, shown for the first time in the middle of the nineteenth century and proclaimed patron in 1855 for having preserved the town from the pestilence; and today Monte San Giusto lives on leather goods and footwear, a trade that has been here since the end of the nineteenth century.