Montelupone

Montelupone has kept its shape: the walls, the four gates and the original stone paving are still there, and the town sits on the top of its hill at 272 metres as it did in the Middle Ages. The coat of arms too is a small map: a rampant wolf above six hills, one paw resting on the last of them and the other on the ground, perhaps the arms of the old Luponi of Fermo, who held lands here between the Chienti and the Potenza. The name says the same thing: from the Roman Mons Luponis one arrives at Montelupone. In the hamlet of San Firmano, down in the plain, stands the Romanesque abbey whose monastery was built around 980 thanks to a noblewoman of the Grimaldi family, and which for centuries controlled a territory far wider than the municipal boundaries.

The curious thing is that other people's revolutions kept passing through this quiet town. In 1798, with the first suppression of the religious orders and the Napoleonic confiscations, Montelupone gave shelter to the Leopardi family of Recanati, in flight from their own city. After the Congress of Vienna it became the seat of one of the first hotbeds of the Carboneria: in palazzo Basvecchi conspirators from the Marche and from Romagna held their meetings, and out of them came the plan for the rising that was to break out in Macerata on the night of 24-25 June 1817 — the police smothered it and arrested a good many people. In 1860 the French troops of generals Lamoricière and De Pimodan halted here before going to lose at Castelfidardo, that is before the Marche passed to the Kingdom of Sardinia. And on 30 June 1944 the town was liberated by the Polish soldiers fighting with the Allies.