Montecassiano

In 1393 the marquis of the March, Andrea Tomacelli, signed a privilege absolving one Giovanni di Matteo for having killed the podestà Paolo da Monte Reale. Recanati, Osimo and Macerata maintained that they had sent that podestà to Montecassiano, and that the people of Montecassiano had killed him together with other envoys; from there began years of fighting between those cities and the town. The same marquis, however, granted Montecassiano the right to elect its own podestà, and in 1396 pope Boniface IX approved the privilege: the town that had killed other people's podestà obtained the right to choose its own. Then Osimo tried: in 1443 it attempted to annex Montecassiano and failed, the next year the pope declared the town a rebel and granted its goods to Osimo, and the place suffered a very grave sack. When later it put itself under the protection of Recanati, it shook that off quickly, because the allies wanted a hand in its internal administration.

The name, on the other hand, comes from a woman dead two thousand years ago. The oldest Roman stone found here is a funerary altar of the first century, unearthed in 1602 at Valle Cascia: it is the eulogy that one Tusidius Cyrus dedicated to his wife Cassia Orestina, of the family of the Cassii who lived at Helvia Recina — and from that name, with the addition of monte, Montecassiano is said to come. Of the borgo the defences remain: Porta Cesare Battisti, once called Porta Santa Croce, had a drawbridge, and inside the arch the housings of the side bombards can still partly be seen, hidden when the moat was filled in. The Palazzo dei Priori is of the thirteenth century, but the face it wears today, battlements included, comes from the restoration begun in 1938. The collegiate church of Santa Maria Assunta was built by the monks of the abbey of Fiastra: Cistercian Gothic, with a single sloping front and a great rose window of white stone.