For a long time I thought that Ancona was not part of the Mediterranean civilization, the sunny and fragrant one of the Campanian archipelago, or of the ancient Roman provinces between the African coasts and Turks, crossroads of peoples and cults.
Ancona has never really been part of the Western, Anglo-American world of the last five centuries.
Instead, I felt it prospectively tense towards Croatia with its array of Middle Eastern cultures, even pro-Russian ones.
From the window of my grandmother's house, in the Sixties, in Via Pizzecolli, I observed, between the screeching of the swallows and the roofs illuminated by the pale spring sun, the sparse ships headed towards the then Yugoslavia, with its beautiful but cold coasts, from which the Soviet wall rose, and Greece, a sort of India of Europe, full of myths and islands, some even without current,
In short, Ancona was a bit on its own compared to other Italian cities, out of the way, with a subdued energy, from which many of us dreamed of leaving and never returning.
“Ancona is a strange city” I heard the people of the Marche hinterland say “It's cold and closed as if it didn't have a port.” In short : distrustful, lukewarm, hated by outsiders.
I didn't know how to answer, because I often found myself in agreement.
After the snack I left my grandparents' house and before reaching my father at the port, where he had a business, I went up the Guasco hill to the Cathedral to go and see what I called “the dead”; that whole skeleton burdened with brocade with a mitre on his head, lying with his mouth open inside a half-glass coffin. No one he had said how and why he was there and above all who he was but by dint of asking I remember someone answering me in his concise slang: “ It's San Ceriago”.
Saint Cyriacus. The patron saint of the city. The protector of Ancona.
Said like that, it doesn't It's just that so many doors had opened for me, I was just happy that it had a name. I felt that I was somehow fond of him, I saw in him my dear grandfather who had recently died, so similarly small and skeletal in his ninety-year-old body.
But they couldn't tell me anything else. I would certainly have investigated further, but the earthquake struck and the city, especially its historic center, suffered a deep wound. Agonizing. My parents said that San Ceriago, despite everything, had protected us, because there had been no... dead. But the center was destroyed, as during the war.
Suddenly I saw the dissolution of family relationships: my uncles moved to the countryside, my grandparents changed cities and so others disappeared from the radar, My father's business, amidst a thousand difficulties, was moved elsewhere. For years, Ancona's most beautiful and oldest neighborhood became a sort of desolate wasteland.
Stories of silent heroism, I could title what I'm writing, because no one ever spoke about the sense of alienation that so many suffered, a before and after that most people tried to overcome as best they could but which in fact turned things upside down many lives, including mine, and it's a miracle that even today, walking through the renovated alleys of the historic center, the mood hasn't changed; on the contrary, the wounds have simply given added value to this city steeped in history.
In the meantime, I returned to live in these parts and my interest in San Ciriaco has regained strength.
I do not hide the beauty of the Cathedral built on the ruins of a Greek temple it stimulated me: the gods did not choose places at random and Guasco hill is energetically positioned in mode' ON with the sun on the sea and seeing it rise at dawn or that we greet him at sunset. And the sea is the constant value of a good on which Ancona has measured itself for millennia, while Venus Euboea, protector of sailors, can be seen even today as the divine ordering force of our perpetually travelling lives. Everything has already happened, while everything is continually happening. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed. 
The figure of Cyriacus is very problematic, his remains were donated by Galla Placidia who wanted to consolidate her relations with Ravenna and'Adriatic, probably emphasizing the fact that Cyriacus was not born a Christian but a Jew and was called Judas. This could have strengthened relations with the Jewish population, present everywhere and instrumental in trade, but also emphasized the fact that Jews could always become Christians.
Piero della Francesca, the enlightened painter who lived in Ancona around 1450, two years later portrayed Judas Cyriacus in the Bacci Chapel in Arezzo – in the cycle of frescoes dedicated to the Stories of the True Cross, in turn inspired by the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.
The Cross is the perspective, Piero as a painter ignores the shadows and it cannot be otherwise: everything is numinous in His presence and even time is suspended, there is no dramatic narration but a satisfaction in the exposition of the story where a Judas, not yet Cyriacus, emerges from the darkness of the trapdoor in which he was locked up by Helen's will., the mother of the emperor Constantine, in search of Golgotha. 
It would be interesting to twin with Arezzo in this sense, Piero's frescoes could enlighten us on the esoteric message of the story and what role Ancona played in the transition. from a pagan civilization in full idolatrous crisis to a Christian one with strong charismatic accents.
Also the story of Elena and her touching story of an eighty-year-old who goes in search of the True Cross offers the dimension of faith that overcomes any obstacle, in a Roman Empire on the defensive and closed in on itself it is contrasted with the Cross, symbol of death but also of rebirth and conjunction between the ascetic vertical plane and the material horizontal plane.
In This sign wins, dream of the'Emperor Constantine, son of Helena, always in the frescoes of Arezzo, in a light that Raphael will try to repeat in his canvases. With this sign you will win"
And he would defeat Maxentius to free Christians from the endless persecutions they had suffered over the centuries. The symbol of Ancona would later be a golden cross on a crimson background, the color of the Byzantine emperors.
Last curiosity: A fragment of the wooden True Cross is exhibited in the crypt of the Cathedral of San Ciriaco, while a much larger find is located in Rome, in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, whose gardens were designed by' architect Paolo Pejrone, who designed, among other things, the 'Fai Gardens' in Recanati.
Ancona, Arezzo, Rome. Fundamental stages for understanding the'the advent of Christianity and the subsequent attempt to recover from its disastrous fall a thousand years later in Constantinople with the'arrival of Pope Pius II who will die in the Cathedral and with him any attempt to recover the'another Rome.
