Routes across Romagna and the Marche

Between the Adriatic coast and the Umbrian-Marchigian hills, dozens of travel licenses document the regular passage of Jewish merchants who connected fairs, ports, and market towns. The Romagna-Marche corridor became a dense geography of movements where travel was neither clandestine nor spontaneous but negotiated through inquisitorial and episcopal permissions. Licenses were issued for short stays – ten, fifteen, or thirty days – but were continuously renewed, turning temporary mobility into a routine practice.

Rimini stood at the heart of the Adriatic corridor. The city’s inquisitor issued numerous permissions for overnight stays and temporary dwellings outside the ghetto. Merchants requested to keep goods “in their houses and warehouses,” or to extend their lodging for business reasons. The rhythm of the fairs and the port’s activities created an urban laboratory where rules were adapted to local economic demands. Rimini thus functioned as an “interface city,” mediating between the restrictive norms of the Church and the practical needs of circulation.

The small town of Fossombrone illustrates how micro-geographies absorbed itinerant trades. In 1654, complaints arose against Prospero Vitali’s “small ghetto,” a house-shop where Jews from neighboring towns gathered to trade and rest. Sixty years later, similar licenses were granted to merchants from Urbino to stay in Fossombrone for fifteen days to collect debts. The repetition of identical requests across decades shows continuity rather than exception: Fossombrone became a stable node in a flexible network.

From the port of Ancona, Jewish merchants moved inland toward Fabriano, Matelica, Camerino, and Montecchio. The documents mention repeated journeys “for fifteen days in each place,” mapping an axis that crossed diocesan boundaries. This “Marchigian backbone” connected Adriatic commerce with the fairs of central Italy. Permissions and renewals illustrate a dynamic economy sustained by mobility, where the Inquisition acted less as a barrier than as a registrar of movement.

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw an increase in formal petitions for extensions and derogations. Merchants asked to prolong their stays, sleep outside the ghetto, or return annually for business. Inquisitors balanced regulation and tolerance: permissions were rarely denied outright, and exceptions multiplied. These cases reveal how bureaucracy, rather than persecution, structured the lived geography of Jewish mobility.

In 1716, the Jews of Urbino and Pesaro addressed a collective letter to the Congregation, denouncing the local Inquisition of Faenza for forbidding their customary trade during fairs. The memorial recalls that for decades they had obtained regular licenses from the vicars of the Holy Office. Their protest was not an act of rebellion but a legal reaffirmation of precedent: it made visible the institutional dialogue that underpinned the network of movements across Romagna and the Marche.

By the early eighteenth century, mobility had become cyclic. Merchants from Pesaro or Urbino requested annual or semiannual permissions to travel to Bologna, Fossombrone, or Ravenna “for ten or fifteen days,” often around the same months. These predictable itineraries show that Jewish circulation was not transient but embedded in regional rhythms of fairs, harvests, and markets, in other words a legitimate, scheduled form of presence.

Viewed together, these sources trace an enduring geography of resilience. From Rimini’s inquisitorial desks to Fossombrone’s workshops and the petitions from Faenza, the Romagna-Marche corridor emerges as a living system of negotiation, adaptation, and economic interdependence. The archival fragments-licenses, protests, renewals-chart a landscape in which travel was a regulated, recognized, and vital component of the Papal States’ economy.