Morrovalle

In 1810 the authorities had to fit out a barracks and lodgings in the town for French soldiers, but the people of Morrovalle refused to provide for their passage: they were tired of the continual requisitions. Five years later, with the battle of the Rancia, more plundering came, and on the fifth of May 1815 the podestà Grisei wrote to the prefect to describe the poverty in which the Napoleonic army had left the population. In the same period, at the villa Grisei on the Bellavista hill, general Murat, king of Naples, had slept: the podestà was denouncing the army whose king had been his family's guest. In 1831 another Grisei, Settimio, led the town's first adherence to the revolutionary order, and the thing took shape in pulling down the papal coat of arms from the town hall; the same Settimio later went to the first war of independence. And among the Cacciatori delle Marche, the band that helped free Ascoli Piceno and Fermo, there was yet another Grisei, Saverio.

The old name was Murri de Valle, stronghold over the valley, and it describes the position well: the town stands on the top of a knoll and looks down towards the Chienti. The first mention in a document is of 995, when the place depended on the bishop of Fermo. In 1053 a Werner of the Lenzburg came down from the German lands to help pope Leo IX against the Normans; Italianised into Guarnerio, he founded the dynasty that would rule the duchy of Spoleto and the marquisate of Camerino, and from one of his descendants came the Lazzarini family, lords of Morrovalle. In the modern age the progressive narrowing of access to the councils and the magistracies turned the few who governed into a civic nobility. On the fourteenth-century tower hangs a great bell of about thirteen tonnes, and the source notes that for that bulk its note is higher than one would expect; in the former Augustinian convent a museum gathers more than nine hundred nativity scenes from all over the world.