Porto Recanati

Porto Recanati broke away from Recanati twice, six and a half centuries apart. The first time in 1230, when the emperor Frederick II ratified possession of the lands between the Musone and the Potenza and authorised the building there of a new port and the works to defend it, among them the castle still called Swabian. The second time by administrative act: a royal decree of the fifteenth of January 1893, signed by Umberto I, ordered that the coastal hamlets of Recanati should become a comune of their own, and on the first of May that year Porto Recanati began to exist as such. The castle, raised between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries as a bulwark against landings by Turkish pirates, today houses the municipal picture gallery, with nine rooms of paintings running from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth.

Long before there was Potentia, a Roman colony founded in 189 before Christ by three triumvirs to give land to the veterans of the Punic wars and to protect the coast from Illyrian pirates. The poet Ennius may have lived there, and the finds attest a family of bankers, the Oppii, and a local production of terracotta that speaks of trade with Etruria, Lazio and Samnium. Cicero records the violent earthquake of 56 before Christ that struck the area. Potentia later became a bishop's see, and its bishop Faustinus, papal legate in Africa and present at the council of Carthage, is the first documented bishop in all the Marche. Then came the century of wars between Lombards, Byzantines, popes and Franks: the inhabitants left the coast for the heights, and the plain, with no one left to regulate its waters, went back to marsh. Today the problem is the opposite, for the sea is taking back the beach and the erosion reaches as far as threatening the roads.