Treia

In 1239 the army of king Enzo, natural son of Frederick the Second, laid siege to this town and failed to take it. In 1263 the army of Corrado d'Antiochia, the same emperor's nephew, tried again, and it went even worse: the people of Treia not only held out but captured Corrado himself. The story goes that they pretended to surrender and dropped the portcullis of the gate as soon as he had ridden in with his whole staff. He stayed a prisoner for two months in the castle of the Cassero and then went free, perhaps because the podestà Baglioni let himself be bought by the enemy. That battle, the battle of Vallesacco, is painted on the historic curtain of the town theatre: an enormous canvas recalling the day the town cheated a Hohenstaufen. The walls, for that matter, had been built precisely for this, with the three castles of the Onglavina, the Elce and the Cassero, the circuit and the gates.

The name comes from the goddess Trea-Jana, a divinity of Greek-Sicilian origin venerated here; the town was a Roman colony and then a municipium, and it was destroyed twice, by the Visigoths in the fifth century and then by the Saracens between the ninth and the tenth. The survivors rebuilt it on three small nearby hills, easier to defend, and gave it a new name: Montecchio, that is little mountain. Montecchio it remained for eight centuries, until in 1790 pope Pius the Sixth, by a bull, raised it to the rank of city and gave it back its ancient name of Treia. Five years later they dedicated a monument to him in the square in front of the town hall, which overlooks the old arena of the game of pallone col bracciale: today that arena is a car park, though since 1979 the challenge match has been played again. In the civic museum, meanwhile, there stand large Egyptian religious statues of the Roman period, which have no equals in the Marche; and the Accademia Georgica is still there, with its archives and its library.