Cartoceto

Oil has been made at Cartoceto for at least seven hundred years: as early as the end of the thirteenth century the documents attest a massive production of olive oil, and since then oil has become the symbol of the place. The town's theatre says it better than any statistic: the Teatro del Trionfo was carved in the eighteenth century out of an old olive mill, and it has a hall with three tiers of boxes, a painted nineteenth-century curtain and its stage equipment still in place; it will work again when the restoration is over. When in the nineteen seventies the economic crisis began to close the shops of the borgo, the reaction came from a group of young people of the Pro Loco, who from 1977 organised a show and market of oil and olives: it has become one of the most important events of Italian olive growing, and in 2004 came the DOP Cartoceto, the first olive oil denomination of the Marche.

The old town has kept its herringbone plan, with narrow alleys and stairways going down the hill, and a little square the inhabitants call La Turchia, Turkey: from there, once, the people of Cartoceto watched for the Ottoman raids along the coast. Of the fortress that Galeotto Malatesta had built in 1343 on the highest point of the castle nothing is left: having lost its strategic importance, it fell into ruin, was badly damaged by the earthquake of 1572 and was never rebuilt; in 1831 the last remains were pulled down and in their place the collegiate church of Santa Maria della Misericordia was raised, which keeps inside a fourteenth-century fresco of the Virgin and Child and a canvas attributed to Federico Barocci. In 1944 the passage of the front spared the old borgo but not Lucrezia, the hamlet down in the valley, almost destroyed by the retreating Germans: it rose again quickly and has become the industrial pole of the comune.