The story
Upstairs in Palazzo dei Priori, the old seat of Fermo's magistrates on Piazza del Popolo, hangs the only painting by Peter Paul Rubens in the Marche region. The young Flemish painter was working in Italy when, in 1608, he finished an Adoration of the Shepherds for Fermo's church of San Filippo Neri, commissioned by Father Flaminio Ricci of the Oratorians and completed in about three months. It is a large night scene, and it is often seen as Rubens paying tribute to Caravaggio.
The civic picture gallery around it spans painting from the 14th to the 19th century. Look for the panels of the life of Saint Lucy by Jacobello del Fiore, a Venetian painter of the early 15th century, and a polyptych by Andrea da Bologna dated 1369.
The visit also leads into the Sala del Mappamondo, a library hall lined with wooden bookcases and finished in 1688, today the oldest part of the town library named after Romolo Spezioli, a Fermo doctor who served Queen Christina of Sweden. It takes its name from a large globe completed in 1713 by the geographer Silvestro Amanzio Moroncelli.
