Though its industrial development has led to JESI being known as "the little Milan of the Marche", the historic centre of the town is well preserved. Clinging to a long ridge, it's fringed by medieval walls and retains a scattering of Renaissance and Baroque palaces. One of the most majestic of these, the Palazzo Pianetti, is home of the Pinacoteca Civica (Tues-Sat 10am-1pm & 4-7pm, Sun 10am-1pm & 5-8pm; L4000/?2.07). The highlight of its opulent interior is the magnificent 72-metre-long stuccoed, gilded and frescoed gallery - a Rococo fantasy of shells, flowers and festoons framing cloud-backed allegorical figures. The collection of paintings is best known for some late works by Lorenzo Lotto , who unlike his contemporaries Titian and Giorgione, chose to be an outsider from the Venetian artworld, opting instead for obscurity, working in such provincial Italian towns as Ancona and Recanati, Treviso and Bergamo. As a result, until recently, he has been neglected though his use of colour and the expressive intensity of his portraits is exceptional, and he was unique in combining this meticulous realism with the southern European traditions of the High Renaissance.

In two graceful Annunciation panels (once part of a triptych), a hurried angel Gabriel delivers the news to a more than slightly taken aback Virgin; and in the Visitation , the setting is a simple domestic interior. Scenes from the refreshingly assertive life of St Lucy (a polyptych) show Lotto's freshness of colour; the Madonna delle Rose is interesting for its naturalistic setting - with a baby Jesus trying to jump into the arms of a grandfatherly St Joseph - as well as its allusions to Christian mysticism.

A stroll around town takes you past the Teatro Pergolesi, a vast eighteenth-century opera house in Piazza della Repubblica, named after the composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Encircling the town are the massive ramparts, restructured in the fourteenth century and built on top of the foundations of Roman walls - an escalator takes you through the ramparts, several metres thick, from the lower town to the upper town (with steps back down again)