Monte Porzio

The old centre of Monte Porzio did not grow a piece at a time: it was built all at once, and it shows. It was wanted by the Gabrielli family of the counts of Montevecchio, who had a series of buildings raised there for their own members, and the design is by the architect Andrea Vici, a pupil of Vanvitelli: an eighteenth-century version of the Renaissance theme of the ideal city, with the spaces laid out by rule and the plays of perspective that hold the whole together. There remain palazzo Montevecchio, palazzo Terni with its long two-storey front and rich window grilles, palazzo Ginevri-Chiocci with the worn arms of the Montevecchio above the door, and palazzo Flaiani-Palestini. The town hall, once the Public palace where the Vicar sat, has the clock tower and a tablet with the names of Pompeo, Federico and Rinaldo, Comites Montis Veteris, and the date 1743; the church of the Lords Counts, of 1748, keeps a Madonna of the Assumption by Andrea Sacchi.

In the nineteenth century, though, the village was known for another thing: scissors. The craft industry of the scissor-makers flourished, and the saying still goes round — scissor-makers of Monte Porzio and balsam of Cantiano. Earlier still, the history of the place rests on a document: the investiture of 24 October 1428, which fixes its bounds on four sides, the river Cesano, the rio di San Michele, the Serra, that is the back of the hills from Monte Cucco to San Giovanni, and the rio maggiore. Older than that is a great Attic red-figure vase, found in a tomb here, showing a warrior arming himself: it is of the first half of the fifth century before Christ and is the largest specimen in the museum of Ancona. A curiosity of today: Monte Porzio has two exclaves, two pieces of its territory that lie inside the comune of Trecastelli.