Montelupone

Montelupone sits on a hill in the lower Potenza valley, eleven kilometers northeast of Macerata. The territory holds Picene and Roman traces and was part of the March of Fermo through the early Middle Ages. The fourteenth-century walls still ring the centro storico almost intact, pierced by four gates: Porta del Trebbio, Porta Ulpiana, Porta Santo Stefano and Porta del Cassero.

On Piazza del Comune the Palazzo del Podestà rises in fourteenth-century brick, with a five-arched loggia, a clock tower and Ghibelline crenellations. Inside the same complex the Teatro Nicola degli Angeli, inaugurated in 1889, holds 272 seats in a neoclassical horseshoe with two orders of boxes and a ceiling of musical angels. Eight kilometers below the hill, in the valley plain, the Abbazia di San Firmano was founded in 986 on the church of Saint John the Evangelist and rebuilt in 1256, with a Byzantine-Romanesque gabled facade. The town carries the carciofo and the honey of the Potenza hills.