Mondolfo

During the breaking up of a vineyard at Mondolfo, an inscribed stone came to light. Nobody recognised it for what it was, and for decades it was used as a seat. From 1982 to 2014 the president of the local archaeology club, Roberto Bernacchia, reported it several times to the responsible bodies and got nowhere; only after some inspections, in 2016, was the object taken into custody by the carabinieri command for the protection of cultural heritage in Ancona and placed in the civic museum. It is a stele in the Picene language, datable between the sixth and the fourth century before Christ, and it is no ordinary object: it proves that Picene was spoken north of the Esino as well, something historians had doubted for want of finds. From the same ground comes a second inscribed stele, but it is worn and only a few letters can be read.

The territory belonged to the possessions of the Byzantine exarchate of Ravenna, and it was the Byzantines who left the strangest mark here. Between the sixth and the seventh century proto-Bulgarian populations settled in these lands, probably called in by the authorities of the exarchate to replace a workforce decimated by epidemics, as happened in the Cesena and Rimini areas too. The name of those people has stayed attached to a place: San Gervasio dei Bulgari, today in the southern outskirts of the town, where an important monastery stood, of which the church remains, and in its crypt the largest Ravennate sarcophagus in the Marche. When the valley floor became dangerous, the population went up the hill; the castle was later ringed by two circuits of walls and crowned in the fifteenth century by a fortress designed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, which the newborn Italy had pulled down.