Old town of Orsomarso

The old town of Orsomarso did not grow gradually, but in small clusters gathered around monasteries and palazzi, starting from the fortress built at the confluence of the Argentino and the Porta La Terra, one of whose commanders, Ursus Martius, gave the village its name. At the top rises the clock tower, a viewpoint, and beneath it the baronial castle with its walls, home of the Brancati family, feudal lords from 1668. On the central square stands the parish church of San Giovanni Battista, built in the 17th century on the remains of a medieval chapel: it holds two canvases of female saints crowned by angels by Francesco Antonio Collimodio, a local 17th-century painter, other canvases of southern Italian art of the 17th and 18th centuries, eight polychrome marble altars from the 18th century, a painted organ and a wooden choir. In the village you also find a fragment of a carved portal from the 12th century and a Romanesque broken column, the Byzantine chapel of San Cosimo, the Franciscan convent founded in 1610 and closed after the 1783 earthquake, and the church of San Leonardo with the nearby water mill. The patron saint, San Sebastiano, is celebrated on 20 January.