TREIA
Ancient diocese in the province of Macerata. For its statistical data V. SAN SEVERO.
Of Picenian origin is the ancient Trea, perhaps a colony, certainly a Roman municipium, which Pliny places among the inland cities of the Fifth Region, and Ptolemy calls Tpáva. It stood about 2 km from the present site, in a locality now called "Mura Saracene"; devastated by Alaric in 404, it then suffered damage from the Lombards, Hungarians, and Saracens, who destroyed II. The inhabitants then gathered on the hill, where they reconstituted a settlement, the present-day one, which was called Monticulum, then Montecchio ("del Potenza" or "di Macerata"). By the 11th century, it had already become a Guelph commune, listed in the Constitutiones Aegidianae among the "civitates mediocres"; subjected in turn to the various rulers of the Marches, it later passed definitively to the Church. An ancient parish church, S. Maria, on the site of the destroyed Trea, is considered by some historians as the cathedral of a primitive diocese, on the assumption that T. too, by analogy with several other cities of Picenum, had its bishops from the earliest centuries (but there is no documentation for this), and that the diocese ceased with the end of the city itself, and thus passed under the jurisdiction of the bishops of Camerino.
Pius VI, with the bull Enixum animi nostri of 2 July 1790, abolished the name of Montecchio, revived the ancient name, and to avoid the damage that could arise from its distance from Camerino—which he had elevated to an archiepiscopal (though not metropolitan) see with the bull Quemadmodum apostolica of 17 Dec. 1787—he decreed that the archbishop of Camerino should appoint a vicar forane in T., a graduate in utroque [iure], with special jurisdiction in both the legal and penal spheres. After the Napoleonic period and the restoration of the Marches to the Church, the inhabitants petitioned Pius VII to elevate their collegiate church to a cathedral and to unite the diocese, aeque principaliter, with that of S. Severino; but the Pope, while declaring the collegiate church a cathedral by a rescript of the Sacred Congregation of the Consistory of 1 Sept. 1815, established that the bishop of T. should be the archbishop of Camerino pro tempore. However, as the Camerino curia delayed the execution of the rescript, seeking to invalidate it, the same Pope, with the bull Pervetustam locorum originem of 8 Feb. 1816, declared T. a "city truly and actually epis-