Montefano

Montefano was born from the ruins of Veragra, a Picene city and Roman military station on the road that led from Nocera Umbra to Ancona, destroyed by the Goths at the beginning of the sixth century. The new town then found itself hemmed in by larger neighbours, and one can read this in its coat of arms. The crenellated tower on it is not its own: it is that of the castle of Montefiore, which Recanati had built on the edge of this territory to defend its own lands. And the oak beside it recalls that Giuliano della Rovere, the future pope Julius II, was welcomed here when Osimo turned him away. A coat of arms, in short, that remembers somebody else's fortress and a man the others had not wanted — and that is no accident, because Montefano lay under Osimo and obtained communal independence only at the end of the fifteenth century, by a papal bull that placed it under the Church.

Its most illustrious figure, moreover, happened here by chance. On 6 May 1501 Marcello Cervini was born here, who would become pope Marcellus II: his parents were simply passing through, travelling from Montepulciano, where the family was at home, towards Macerata. In the church of Santa Maria Assunta there is instead a sixteenth-century panel of the Venetian school attributed to Claudio Ridolfi in which bishop Saint Honoratus offers the city of Montefano on a tray. And the town theatre, the Rondinella, has a history out of all proportion to the size of the place: the stage was built in 1802, and the rebuilding of 1887, to a design by the architect Luigi Daretti, was carried out by the engineer Virgilio Tombolini, at that time technical director of the Teatro la Fenice in Venice. On the ceiling Domenico Bruschi painted four Muses and four putti bearing the words childhood, youth, manhood and old age.