San Ginesio

The patron of San Ginesio is neither a bishop nor a warrior: he is a mime. Genesius of Rome was martyred in 303 on the order of Diocletian for refusing to perform on stage, in mockery, the baptism of the Christians, and for this he became the saint of theatre people. In 1601 pope Clement VIII granted the village his relic, a left arm; but since Genesius and Eleutherius had been buried together, to avoid any mistake Rome sent two left arms, and since then both have been kept in the Collegiata. It is a detail that says a great deal about how relics were handled: better two than the risk of taking the wrong one. Churches, in any case, are not lacking here, so much so that the town has earned the nickname of the village of a hundred churches.

The name appears for the first time in 995 as castrum Sancti Genesij, and before that the place is said to have been called Avia or Esculanum; the spelling too was long uncertain, because until the presidential decree of 1952 one often found it written as a single word, Sanginesio. The town stands at 680 metres and they call it the balcony of the Sibillini, because from up there one sees the whole range and, on the other side, the sea. Governed by the Da Varano of Camerino from 1355 to 1434, it had a long rivalry with Fermo, which on 30 November 1377 turned into a battle, that of the Fornarina. Around 1450 three hundred men of San Ginesio were exiled on a charge of plotting against the pope and took refuge in Siena: they behaved so well that the Sienese rulers sent their own ambassadors to San Ginesio to plead their cause before the town's magistracy.