Tolentino

Tolentino (anc. Tolentinum Picenum), a town of the Marches, Italy, in the province of Macerata, 11 m. by rail W. by S. of that town. Pop. (1901), 5111 (town), 13,197 (commune). It is situated on the Chienti, 735 ft. above sea-level, and was once a fortified town of great strength. The cathedral has a fine portal by the Florentine Giovanni Rosso (1435), and contains the remains of S Nicholas of Tolentino (d. 1309), whose Renaissance tomb and frescoes illustrating the life of the saint by Lorenzo and Jacopo da San Severino are preserved in a room adjoining the chapel north of the high altar. The church of San Catervo contains the early Christian sarcophagus of that saint, which is embellished with curious reliefs. The Museo Civico contains antiquities discovered during excavations near the town (in 1880-1884) in the Picene necropolis, dating from the 8th-4th centuries B.C. The town is the birthplace of the condottiere Niccolo Mauruzzi, and of the learned Francis Philelphus, one of the first disseminators of classical literature, who was born in 1398. At Tolentino the treaty was made between Bonaparte and the pope in 1797, by which the pope ceded Avignon; and here in 1815 a battle was fought in which the French under Murat were defeated by the Austrians.