San Severino Marche

San Severino Marche sits in the Potenza valley, fifty kilometers southwest of Ancona and split between two centers. The medieval Castello, on Monte Nero, holds the 40-meter Smeducci tower, the Duomo Vecchio consecrated in 1304 in Romanesque-gothic on the site of a 944 cathedral, and the surviving ring of city walls. The lower city, the Borgo, is built around Piazza del Popolo, a 224-meter elliptical square surrounded by porticoed colonnades, one of the largest open civic spaces in the Marche.

The fifteenth-century Salimbeni brothers, Lorenzo and Jacopo, were born here and decorated the Duomo Vecchio's chapel and the Church of San Lorenzo in Doliolo with frescoes that mark the height of late gothic painting in the region; their works and a Vittore Crivelli polyptych now sit in the Pinacoteca Civica Tacchi Venturi inside Palazzo Manuzzini. The Smeducci dynasty governed the town through the fourteenth century, the period of its greatest cultural growth.