Distances

• Ascoli Piceno – 33 Km
• Fermo – 32 Km
• Grottammare – 25 Km
• Assisi – 135 Km
• Perugia – 153 Km
• Roma – 245 Km
• Milano – 523 Km

Montalto delle Marche, located at a height of about 512 m a.s.l., in the sixteenth century became an Episcopal seat ruling over the territory between the rivers Aso and Tesino. And this happened thanks to a Pope born locally and later named Pope Sisto V.

The most important building is the Palace of Preside dating back to 1586, starting date of its construction and was completed at a later stage in the eighteenth century. Today it hosts the council house, a picture gallery, an archaeological collection, a prison museum and an ethnographic arrangement. This palace is in the upper part of the town in Piazza Umberto I where there are also the baroque church of San Niccolo’ (1647), the eighteenth-century library hosting also the Historical Archive, and the sixteenth-century Casa Orlandi, residence of the pope Sisto V. In the area there are Palace Sacconi with an ostentatious neo-gothic façade and the sixteenth-century palaces Massi Mauri and Paradisi. From the Marina Gate you can reach the lower part of the town which was completely renovated according to the city plan rules of Sisto. There you can visit the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, with the lower church dating back to the late sixteenth-century and the upper church which was built during the seventeenth century and boasts a high nineteenth-century porch with a balcony in front of its façade. To the front in piazza Sisto V there is the former Seminario Vescovile (Episcopal Seminary) (1825) which now hosts an important collection of sacred art including the thirteenth-century Crucifix of Umbrian school and the very precious Reliquary of Montalto, a masterpiece of fourteenth-century Parisian goldsmith art, a donation by Pope Sisto to the cathedral.