Marche Breaks

After the first settlement of the Picenians, who came here from Sabina, and the Roman conquered territories, the history of the old urban centre of Monte Rinaldo begins in the early 1200’s when Malugero Melo, son of Drogone of Altavilla, a Norman count from Puglia, run away to Fermo with his mother Porzia where he married a certain Morica. He had three children, one of them was named Rinaldo to whom he built and gave a castle which still stands on the present town area.

Going along the green hills you reach a dell of different ancient districts such as Cuma, where a Hellenic-style sanctuary built by Romans in 268 B.C. was discovered in 1957-62: it was a meeting point for local people living all over the territory.

All around, in early Middle Ages, a lot of Roman villas rose giving a sense of life continuity to local people. The exploration of the sanctuary, started in 1957 and not yet finished, has so far discovered and assembled some architectural elements referring to a previous portico of 66 metres in length made up of a basic wall of big tuff blocks and a double row of tuff columns. The central columns of the portico are higher, 6.80 metres, and have Ionian-Italic style capitals; the outer ones, are Doric styled; at the western end of the portico you can notice a room built later, as it can be deduced by the style of the three Ionian columns capitals’ which  rise on the front between two pilasters. The temple on high podium is surrounded by a foundation with portico of Tuscan volcanic tuff and shows the signs of  a two phases progressive widening, while some fire traces can be seen on the artistic groups belonging to frontons and friezes which date back to the same century; those fire traces might be caused by a devastation during the fighting of a social war on Picenian land. Furthermore the excavations gave back some parts of fictile statues: among them are pictures of men dressed in armours and breeches probably relating to the fronton as a composition of heroic subject with probable references to local historical episodes. Nowadays it is no possible to restore the fronton groups and also the problem of the temple cannot be solved: nobody knows whom it was two side niches. For the same reason its historical archaeological setting is still unknown.

In the district of Cuma Bucchiano you can find a mid-hilly landscape crossed by some typical white country roads with some remains of Mediterranean areas made up of age-old oaks and poplars; along the Aso river and the Indaco stream we can see the typical river vegetation.