Having just returned from a visit to the Antiquarium of Numana, managed admirably by Dr. Nicoletta Frapiccini, as well as to the Archeodromo which is nearby, I began to wonder who our ancestors really were, those who inhabited our region and began to identify themselves as a people, even if history tells us of various invasions over the centuries, however the archetype that forever characterized our territory under a defined parental lineage responds to the name of the Piceni.
A warrior people, apparently, who moved, shack and puppets, from Sabina towards the Marche led by a woodpecker, which is today the symbol of our region, or the Picus, a sort of totem, a sacred animal identified in Mamurio or Mars as defined later by the Romans. In short, a god of war.
But not only. When the land was no longer enough for everyone, the sacred spring was prepared, that is, the firstborns, having reached adulthood, had to emigrate to found new communities elsewhere. Enough, let's change places. The migration was prepared with a precise procedure and the movements of the guide animal were interpreted. The Woodpecker is generally an animal that senses the rains, nests in the oaks, makes a loud noise with its beak on the trunks and climbs in a spiral, I can think that the migration lasted years, and that this bird went towards our land because it was rich in vegetation and also in animals, and finally they also found the sea, and began to trade precious materials such as amber, in which Numana and its port was a crossroads of trade, iron from Etruria and ivory from Africa. The Adriatic was then more important than the Tyrrhenian. 
Avid researchers like Robert Graves tell us that the Woodpecker was also Picus, a king or Faun, who led them from Lazio to the Marche and Abruzzo, and this may also be plausible, but Faun is the alter ego of the god Pan , which was born as the son of an oak woodpecker and therefore from an egg. Pan is the god of nature. Since the link between Rome and Arcadia has always been close, it is also possible that a Pelopid tribe had reached Lazio from the Black Sea, therefore the Piceni came from Sabina but even before that they were from the Peloponnese and even before that from the Black Sea.
I'm not getting lost, because history teaches us that populations move, they never stay still, especially when they have to survive. As for the warrior god Mars or Mamurius, if you prefer, he, more than anything else in the times of Romulus and Remus, was a shepherd god with a red face and great erotic vigor who immortalized Rhea Silvia in a cave and made him give birth to twins. Rhea Silvia finally ran away and the one who fed the children was a wolf and a woodpecker. Pan, the god with an obscure genealogy, like the origin of instinct, strangely has a wolf at his service.
The dance of the Picene warriors around the wolves comes to mind, a lid found in the display case of the Archaeological Museum of Ancona, the wolves attack the sheep, therefore also Mars the shepherd god. So who are the wolves in this carousel of animals and gods, the ones who attack the sheep or the ones who fed Rome?
In Numana it is possible to understand how they lived, in the archaeological area called the Quagliotti Davanzali area, they rebuilt a small house and ovens, the intimate family: a bed, a loom, furnishings for cooking and stone grinding. While the archaeologists were explaining to me how the typical day of a Picene woman proceeded, I wondered how she could live, if she had been a happy child, if she had not suffered traumas, if she had hugged and held dear people, kissed cheeks and caressed hair. I began to feel that feeling that made her somehow similar and different at the same time, I saw her walking along a path and reaching the beach, while the children ran behind her. A simple life, with a high birth rate and an equally high mortality rate. Everything was message, symbol, owl. The senses were heightened to the highest degree and I believe that the communication was in other spheres, not just verbal. An instinctual people, always ready to fight. Perhaps some of that sense has remained with us. Today we from the Marche region are working warriors, great fighters.
Even then, as today, there were great differences in caste: when I visited the Antiquarium I was able to admire the rich finds found in a tomb which was later called the "Queen's Tomb", who was not a queen, perhaps a rich merchant of Greek origin, they tell us about personal chariots, horses, fine Greek ceramics with references to Dionysus and the Gorgon, finely crafted jewellery. Wealth and poverty, like in a comedy by Eduardo.
