Ancona
Ancona historical timeline
History
Ancona's history is the history of its harbour, and of everyone who wanted it.
Greek foundation
Around 387 BC Greek exiles from Syracuse, fleeing the tyrant Dionysius, settled the promontory and founded a city on the sheltered side of the elbow. It kept its Greek name and, for a long time, its Greek connections.
Trajan
Rome took it in the third century BC and used it as a naval base. In AD 115 Trajan paid for a major enlargement of the harbour from his own funds, and the senate and people put up an arch on the new mole to say so. The fleet for the Dacian wars sailed from here.
A maritime republic
In the Middle Ages Ancona was an independent maritime city, trading with Constantinople and the Levant and resisting both the emperor and Venice. It held a famous siege against imperial forces in 1173.
Papal rule
The papacy absorbed it in 1532 and built a citadel to hold it. Ancona became a free port in 1732, which is when Vanvitelli built the quarantine island and the arch that carries his name.
War
Bombed repeatedly from 1943, the city was taken in July 1944 by the Polish II Corps after a hard fight along the coast. The old centre was severely damaged.
The Jewish city
Ancona had one of the oldest and most important Jewish communities on the Adriatic, trading with the Levant under papal licence and confined to a ghetto from 1555. In 1556 twenty-five Portuguese converts were burned in the city on the orders of Paul IV, an act that provoked an attempted trade boycott of the port organised from Constantinople.
Since
An earthquake in 1972 and the landslide of 1982 both pushed people out of the centre, and the city has spent the decades since rebuilding and arguing about its port.