Sarnano

Sarnano sits on a hill within the Monti Sibillini National Park, seventy kilometers from Ancona. The old free commune built its civic center at the top of the settlement, where the square gathers the palazzi of the medieval government side by side with the church, a small stage for a town that once governed itself. Below, the brick lanes drop away in concentric rings, the same baked brick used for houses that bridge the streets overhead and for small doors set into the walls to mark where the dead were once carried out.

The spa lay downhill from the old town, drawing on springs pure enough to be used for respiratory, rheumatic and joint treatments from the 1930s until the earthquake of 24 August 2016 shut the historical building down; a new facility is being built to replace it. Above the town, on Sassotetto, the ski slopes and the Sasso Spaccato mark the upper territory as the seasonal counterpart to the streets below. The town reads, then, as a set of layers stacked by elevation and by era: a governing hilltop, a residential brick warren beneath it, a therapeutic spa at the edge, and a working mountain above, each holding its own use across centuries rather than competing for the same one.