Pollenza

On 2 and 3 May 1815 the battle that is called of Tolentino was in fact fought on this territory, at a place named Cantagallo: it ended with the retreat of Joachim Murat, and with him the Napoleonic adventure in Italy ended too; these lands went back to the Church. Before that the village had been through everything: Napoleon's provisional government, the Roman Republic, and the tree of liberty raised in the middle of the square and then cut down. Until 1862 the place was called Montemilone, after the Carolingian captain Milone who had rebuilt it before the year one thousand, having received the fief from a pope and an emperor. Then the new kingdom gave it back its Roman name, Pollenza — partly because there was another Montemilone already, down in the province of Potenza.

In the arms of the comune there are five castles: that of Monte Milone, which is the old centre, and the four that stood around it — the Cassero, Castel Gualdo, Gagliano and Castel Franco. The walls went up in the thirteen hundreds; in 1443 Francesco Sforza's men took the town and burned both the centre and the abbey of Rambona, which is among the oldest in the Marche, and the town at once rebuilt its walls with twelve towers. What it lived on afterwards was clay: the art of Pollenza pottery was brought by potters from elsewhere who came to settle here, the first of them in 1509, and it lasted four centuries. In the church there is an altarpiece of the late fourteen hundreds which, tradition says, healed the plague-stricken as it passed them in procession.