The mystery of the infinite

“Rome and Treja are bound by the mystery of their names… Treia,  which is spelt –more or less – like “terra” (i.e. earth)…was born from a mystery, a mystery  lost forever. I will call it a town but in fact it is a city.

The town was given back its civic dignity by a Pope, who earned himself a monument. It is a bronze bust with a stone base, which seizes the light and seems to hover into the air. It stands up into the air like a giant Ostensorium whose  background  cannot be but the sky”.

That is how Dolores Prato describes the town where she lived her childhood  at the beginning of the 20^th century . The writer’s emotions can be found in her novel “Giù la piazza non c’è nessuno” (Nobody Down in the Square) published by Mondadori. Since then, little has changed. The town still has its warm ochre coloured bricks, lit by the beautiful sun which shines in the clear air against the light blue sky and the green countryside. Walking along the streets and in the squares you can discover priceless treasures on every corner, perfectly preserved.

Trea, Montecchio, Treia: 25 centuries of history which stretch from the Roman period, through the Middle Ages, up to modern times. Walking alongside the walls, the view covers an area which ranges from Mount Conero to the Sibillini Mountains.

 The many-towered walls take us back to the 13th Century, to Beato Pietro da Treia, whose life  is described in St. Francis’ “Fioretti” and to Frederic II. His  son Enzo, helped by Corrado D’Antiochia, tried to conquer Treia, but to no purpose:   the citizens  beat and imprisoned him  inside  Porta Vallesacco (Vallesacco Door). The door is still  very impressive, as the Tower of Onglavina  the south bulwark of the town, built during the Longobard period (568 - 764 A.D.).

Along the streets and and all around the most important squares of Treia  there are extraordinary churches and neoclassical palaces with elegant façades on which traces of the Renaissance period and of the late 18th Century can be seen.

This is the town where important people – well-known around the world – lived. Two of those people were Ilario Altobelli (a Franciscan, mathematician and astronomer who discovered the satellites around Saturn; he was a friend of Galileo Galilei) and Carlo Didimi, famous player of the game of the “bracciale” to whom Giacomo  Leopardi dedicated one of his  odes.

In Treia you can feel  an atmosphere full of history, the same atmosphere that leads Dolores Prato to write “.... Opposite the hospital there was a wall, a little taller than a man, which restricted your view: it was a line drawn across the sky and the horizon was covered by this line: a large sky beyond, and possibly the sea beneath. This line limited the space nearby, , but the space expanded into infinity beyond it. If Giacomo Leopardi had been from Treia, he would have sensed here the mystery of the infinite...”

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