# The Italian Town That Glows at Night > Meet Ascoli Piceno, a town built from travertine that seems to glow after dark. Discover what makes its rich history and architecture so striking. - URL: https://langandtrip.com.ua/en/article/italiiske-misto-iake-svitytsia-vnochi/ - Language: en - Published: 2024-08-21 - Categories: Culture, Historic Sites, Museums, Tours, Italy, Food & Drinks --- Walk through Ascoli Piceno and, in some ways, it could be any Italian town. There are two grand squares where locals watch the days go by, sit in cafes people-watching, and take their evening passeggiata. There are centuries-old churches and even ancient remains dating back to Roman times. Like so many other Italian towns, the center was built in the medieval period. And, like the others, it has been beautifully preserved. But take a stroll, especially after dark, and you'll notice one striking difference: Ascoli seems to glow. By day, the buildings and even the cobblestones shimmer in the sunlight. By night they glow in the moonlight, with towers, porticoes and street lamps reflected perfectly in the paving, turning the town center into something like a mirage. It all comes down to Ascoli's local stone, from which the entire historic center is built: travertine, a precious, marble-like stone that shines white under the midday sun, turns pink at sunset and glows beneath the evening street lamps. Today travertine, and Italian travertine in particular, is an expensive material. You're more likely to find it in bathrooms or as flooring than holding up whole buildings. But Ascoli's travertine buildings and cobblestones were laid long before it became such a prized material. Many of the grand buildings you see today date back to the Roman period. ## A Miniature Ancient Rome ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-1-2024.jpg) More precisely, they were rebuilt from Roman structures, which is why you'll see churches perched on visible remains of Roman temples, and fragments of arches and capitals woven into medieval and Renaissance palazzi. The Romans weren't the first to settle here, says Lella Palumbi, a tour guide in Ascoli. The town originally belonged to the Piceni, an ancient tribe whose territory stretched across much of what is now the Marche region, from Pesaro in the north to Chieti in modern-day Abruzzo. They founded the town centuries before Rome was born. The Piceni were great warriors, Palumbi says, and as the Romans grew more powerful they were quick to seek them out as allies. But the Piceni's request for Roman citizenship sparked a year-long war that ended with the capture of Ascoli. Once inside, the Romans razed the town to the ground and decided to build it anew. "That's when travertine Ascoli was born," says Palumbi. A sedimentary form of limestone, travertine forms when hot springs deposit calcium carbonate minerals. It's known for its porosity, an almost elastic quality, thanks to outside organisms such as algae, moss and bacteria, and often fossils. ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-2-2024.jpg) The Romans were already using it for their most important buildings and monuments in Rome, drawing on the quarries at Tivoli, not far from the city. They even called the stone "lapis tiburtinus," or "stone from Tivoli," which later became "travertino." Having conquered Ascoli, the Romans noticed that similar quarries lay just a few miles from the town, near the ancient Via Salaria. They used the stone to build a gleaming new town, a way to flaunt their power even over their most battle-hardened opponents. It was, in Palumbi's words, "a miniature Rome." There were temples, a courthouse, spa buildings and a Capitol. One square, Piazza San Tommaso, is still slightly curved, because it sits on the site of an ancient amphitheater; a little outside the town center lie the remains of a Roman theater, one of the few ancient buildings to survive the town's medieval makeover. ## 2,000 Years of Recycling ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-3-2024.jpg) Roman Ascoli long outlasted the days of the empire, but in the medieval period its residents decided to rebuild it. Rather than using new stone, as they might now, they recycled the Roman buildings, using travertine cut 1,000 years earlier to build the town of their day. Today the churches of San Venanzio and San Gregorio Magno stand on the sites of Roman temples, incorporating their stones into the structure; the latter even reused pagan foundations and a back wall, and built its facade around two original Corinthian columns. "Everything is recycled, we dismantled the Roman monuments to build the medieval town," says Palumbi, who also owns Ozio, a bar housed in a medieval building that uses Roman stone updated during the Renaissance. "They were trying to save time and energy, so instead of heading into the mountains to quarry travertine, they took what was already here. The town was essentially a quarry." Look closely at the many towers that made this a medieval Manhattan (Ascoli was sometimes called "the town of 100 towers") and you'll spot plenty of carved Roman slabs, she says. ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-4-2024.jpg) The town went through yet another rebuild during the Renaissance, still exclusively in travertine, making Ascoli Piceno a blend of architectural heritage that never changed material. "Ascoli is the only town in the world built entirely of travertine," says Stefano Papetti, director of the town's five museums in his role as scientific adviser to its municipal collections. "It's different from Italy's other art cities. They're mostly built of brick and then 'dressed' in travertine or marble. But here, whether it's the Roman, medieval, Renaissance periods or later, every building is made from solid blocks of travertine quarried in the mountains around Ascoli." ## A Wes Anderson Shapeshifter ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-5-2024.jpg) Today Ascoli Piceno has the highest concentration of Romanesque churches in any Italian town center. Its 6th-century baptistery is considered one of the finest examples of its kind in the country. The Pinacoteca Civica art gallery in Ascoli holds works by Titian, Guido Reni and Carlo Crivelli, a 15th-century Venetian painter who worked in the Marche region and died in this town. And the most famous cafe, Caffe Meletti, looks like it stepped straight out of a Wes Anderson film, with its soft-pink facade, mint-green tables and lavish art nouveau interior. Everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Simone de Beauvoir has tried the anise liqueur here. The town is even celebrated for its food. "Olive ascolane," large, juicy olives stuffed with meat and deep-fried, are eaten all over Italy. ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-6-2024.jpg) Still, little can compare to the travertine buildings of Ascoli Piceno. Piazza Arringo, the cathedral square, is ringed by grand Renaissance buildings, including the 12th-century town hall that houses the art gallery. Elderly locals sit on travertine benches outside, watching water spurt from the mouths of two bronze seahorses in the fountain opposite. The fountain itself is, of course, travertine. To reach the town, you walk or drive across a Roman bridge built from travertine. Meanwhile Piazza del Popolo, the other main square, is surrounded by Renaissance buildings; this part of town was rebuilt in the early 1500s. Travertine porticoes conceal medieval shops that were deemed insufficiently harmonious for the Renaissance. One side of the square is taken up entirely by the church of San Francesco, considered one of the finest Gothic buildings in Italy. On the other stands the Palazzo dei Capitani with its tower, a castle-like building now used by the local authorities, which regularly hosts exhibitions and offers public access to the Roman market in its basement. Paved entirely in travertine, this square glows at night, when cleverly placed street lamps make the porticoes seem to dissolve into the ground, the palazzi appear to hover in the air, and the whole place feels like a shimmering mirage. "It's wonderful at night when it's lit up," says Papetti, adding that Ascoli actually shifts shape every day. "Travertine has the ability to change color depending on the sun and the weather," he says. "It can be very warm, it can turn pink in the sun, for example. In bad weather it goes gray." ## The Stone That Saved the Town ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-7-2024.jpg) Travertine has another special quality that adds to Ascoli's beauty. When first quarried it's relatively soft, which makes it easy to carve. That's one reason Ascoli's buildings have such ornately sculpted portals and facades, and many Renaissance houses even have mottoes carved above their doorways. Then, through a chemical process of oxidation, it hardens into stone so durable that Ascoli's buildings have survived countless earthquakes over the centuries. It wasn't destroyed by the powerful earthquake of 1703, and it wasn't badly damaged by the 2016 earthquake that devastated Amatrice, an hour's drive away. Of course, Amatrice was closer to the epicenter in both cases; it was also destroyed in 1703. The terrain is different too. Ascoli sits on more stable ground than other nearby areas. But, according to Papetti, "the stone helps make the buildings more resilient." Palumbi agrees: "The Romans knew about earthquakes and built Ascoli to withstand them. They had better engineers than we do today. "We could still be living comfortably in Roman houses if we hadn't torn them down." Although the 2016 earthquake did cause damage, several churches are closed for structural repairs, and post-earthquake surveys showed that other buildings need anti-seismic work, nothing was destroyed, unlike in other towns in the region. ## Ascoli's "Everything" ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-8-2024.jpg) For centuries, Ascoli's travertine quarries, spread across three areas around the town, were the most important part of the local economy. Medieval and Renaissance builders used the Roman quarries on the Via Salaria. But in the 20th century, quarries opened in the hills around the town, especially on Colle San Marco, which rises just beyond it on the border with Abruzzo. In the postwar years, around 15 quarries sprang up. Giuliano Giuliani's father opened one of them in 1952. His family was so tied to their quarry that he likes to say he was born in it. "I played on the stones as I grew up," he says. "I live in a travertine house and walk on travertine every day." The quarry closed in the late 1980s, along with the others in the area, partly due to the economic crisis and partly to environmental laws. But Giuliani held on to his. Today he's a sculptor. And, of course, he sculpts in travertine, mostly from blocks from his father's quarry that were cut before it closed. Sometimes he buys stone from the quarries that still operate in Acquasanta, west of Ascoli. And he describes working with travertine as a "spiritual experience." "For me it's the most beautiful stone of all, because it's stratification, history itself, a slate of time, from the springs that laid down the rock to the animals that wandered past and left fossils. It's a scene that tells a story of thousands of years. "Just as a tree has annual rings, in travertine you can read the centuries, the weather and the floods." ![](/storage/image/prev/august-article-image-57-9-2024.jpg) Papetti, an admirer, says Giuliani can make the stone "as soft as a sheet of paper." It's all thanks to the stone's "elasticity," the artist says. "When I decided I needed to become an artist, I chose the stone I grew up with, partly because it inspired me, but also for technical reasons, because it lets me create very light sculptures," he says. His works, thin and translucent, with that almost impossible paper-like texture Papetti mentions, have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Milan Design Week and Italy's Expo 2015. His clients range from Pink Floyd's Roger Waters to the Vatican, and yet the modest Giuliani says his heroes are the "incredible" people who once separated enormous blocks of stone from the mountain. The quarry, surrounded by chestnut and oak trees at 700 meters above the town, is his studio. He even has plans to open a "travertine school" where people from all over the world can learn to work with the stone. What would Ascoli Piceno be without its travertine? "Nothing," he says. "Travertine means everything."