TOLENTINO (anc. Tolentinum

See also:

• PICENUM

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 .