TREIA. - Ancient diocese in the province of Macerata. For its statistical data see SAN SEVERINO.
Of Picene origin is the ancient Trea, perhaps a colony, certainly a Roman municipium, which Pliny places among the inland cities of the Fifth Region, and which Ptolemy calls Τρῶλαν. It stood about 2 km from the present site, in a locality now called "Mura Saracena"; devastated by Alaric in 404, it later suffered the depredations of the Lombards, the Hungarians, and the Saracens, who destroyed it. The citizens then gathered on the hill, where they rebuilt an inhabited center, the present one, which was called Monticulum, Monticulum, and then Montecchio ("del Potenza" or "di Macerata"). By the 11th century it had already constituted itself as a Guelph Commune, listed in the Constitutiones Aegidianae among the "civitates mediocres"; later subjected to the various rulers of the Marches, it then passed definitively to the Church. An ancient parish church, S. Maria, on the site of the destroyed Trea, is considered by some historians to be the cathedral of a primitive diocese, on the presumption that T., too, by analogy with several other cities of Picenum, had its bishops from the earliest centuries (but of this there is no documentation) and that the diocese ceased with the end of that same city, 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 and renewed there the ancient one, and in order to avoid the harms that could arise because of the distance from Camerino, which he had elevated with the bull Quemadmodum apostolica of 17 Dec. 1787 to an archiepiscopal see, non-metropolitan, he arranged that the archbishop of Camerino keep in T. a vicar forane holding a degree in utroque with special jurisdiction also in the judicial and penal field. After the Napoleonic period, and [he] restored the Marches to the Church, the people of Treia asked Pius VII to elevate their collegiate church to a cathedral and that the diocese be united, aeque principaliter, with that of S. Severino; but the Pope, while declaring the collegiate church a cathedral, by rescript of the S. Congreg. Concistoriale of 1 Sept. 1815, established that the bishop of T. should be the archbishop pro tempore of Camerino. Since, however, the Curia of Camerino delayed the execution of the rescript, seeking to invalidate it, the same Pope, with the bull Peruvetastam locorum originem of 8 Febr. 1816, declared T. "civitatem vere et realiter episcopal" with its Curia, seminary, and with all the rights, honors and prerogatives of episcopal cities, and separating its territory from the see of Camerino he gave to the archbishop of that see the perpetual administration of T., with the obligation of residing there for some months of the year, of keeping a vicar general there, and of signing in all acts with the copulative name of archbishop of Camerino and perpetual administrator of T. But given the distance between Camerino and T., Pope Benedict XV, with the apostolic constitution Bani Pastoris of 20 February 1920, united in perpetuity the diocese of T. with that of S. Severino, whose bishop became the perpetual administrator of T.
T. gave birth to the blessed Pietro known as of T., a famous preacher and promoter of peace in the Marches, torn by internal discords; he died in Girolo (Ancona), where his tomb is venerated. Cardinal Nicola Grimaldi (1768-1845) was from T.; he was governor of Rome at the time of Gregory XVI, who created him cardinal, and was a benefactor of T., where he sent the two marble statues of the apostles Peter and Paul, belonging to the tomb of the emperor Otto II.
Noteworthy in T. are the Cathedral, dedicated to the Most Holy Annunziata, and in the surroundings the sanctuary of the Crucifix and the small sanctuary of the Madonna del Ponte, in the hamlet of Passo di T. In T. the literary Academy of the Sollevati (15th-16th centuries) was famous, and it revived in 1776 under the name of Georgic Society of the Sollevati for agrarian studies and experiments; it has its seat in a palace, the work of Valadier.