Last Minute Itinerari Amelia

The town Amelia

The main entrance of the city of Amelia is the monumental Roman Door, one of the four accesses to the ancient part, more times retouched. It owes the actual aspect to interventions of restructuring of the XVI and XVII century.

In testimony of the prestigious role dressed again from the city in the Roman epoch, there are visible traces that document its importance. One of them is the grandiose Roman Cistern, an imposing sequence of ten rectangular rooms placed side by side one to the other. It's a huge work of hydraulic engineering, performed for guaranteeing a suitable harvest of rain water to the city, able to allow the constant water provisioning in all the seasons of the year.

Another important monument is the Civic Tower, built in the XI century as emblem of the new free commune. It's high over thirty meters over houses' roofs, simple, elegant and compact structure. The dodecahedral shape remembers the subdivision in the twelve zodiacal signs, but also of the twelve apostles. The stones and the ashlars that compose the tower are a miscellany of material coming from sarcophagi, lintels and friezes of Roman and medieval origin.

For what concerns the sacred buildings, the most greater is the Cattedrale, erect in the IX century, but almost entirely destroyed in a fire in 1629 and reconstructed in Baroque style, while its façade is older built only in the XIX century in rose brickwork.

A particular mention is deserved to the 1287 St. Francis valuable churches, from the beautiful façade with rose window of the beginning of the XV century, the church of Sant'Agostino, of the XIII century, from the façade in Romanesque-Gothic style.