Ancona
capital of a province in Italy, is situated on a promontory of the Adriatic coast, 127 miles S. E. of Ravenna by rail. The seat of a bishop. Pop. about 70,000.
It is still the most important seaport on the Adriatic between Venice and Brindisi. The manufactures are silk, ships rigging, leather, tobacco, and soft soap; the exports (declining in recent years) are cream of tartar, lamb and goat skins, asphalt, bitumen, corn, hemp, coral, and silk. A mole of 2,000 feet in length, built by the Emperor Trajan, and a triumphal arch of the same emperor, are the most notable monuments of antiquity. One of the most venerable buildings is the Cathe dra of San Ciriaco, built in the 11th ANDERSEN ANCRUM MOOR century, and possessing the oldest cupola Sierra Nevada attains a height of 11,657 in Italy. Ancona is supposed to have been feet. Cotton and sugar-cane flourish in founded about 380 B. C. by Syracusans, the open air, and the cactus and aloe who had fled from the tyranny of Dionysius the Elder. It was destroyed by the Goths, rebuilt by Narses, and again destroyed by the Saracens in the 10th century. It afterward became a republic; but in 1532 Pope Clement VII. annexed it to the states of the Church. In 1797 it was taken by the French; but in 1799 General Meunier was obliged to surrender it to the Russians and Austrians, after a long and gallant defense. In 1832 a French force took possession of the town and kept it in their hands till 1838, when both French and Austrians retired from the Papal states. In 1849 a revolutionary garrison in Ancona capitulated after enduring a siege by the Austrians of 25 days. In 1861 the flag of the kingdom of Italy waved over the ancient city. "The March of Ancona" was the name applied to the territory lying between the Adriatic and the Apennines, from Tronto N. W. of San Marino. Erected into an independent marquisate under the Longobards, the district was a papal dependency from the 13th century, but passed into the hands of Victor Emmanuel in 1860.