OK, so Italy - but why Marche?

It’s one thing to move to a country with a different language and culture, but it’s another thing to go to a part of the country that most people have never heard of. So then why Le Marche?

It was eventually a very deliberate decision, but it wasn’t even necessarily going to be Italy in the beginning. While it was always the one and only choice for my wife, Spain initially had the inside track on my betting sheet. It wasn’t until I started reading about Le Marche in International Living that my own interest in Bella Italia perked up. Words like “undiscovered”, “the new Tuscany”, “mountains”, “ocean”, all contrived to put me on a plane for a 12-day solo research trip. From then on, there was only one horse in the race.

As it turned out, getting there was fairly simple – a flight into Rome, then a train to Ancona, Marche’s biggest city and a busy ferry port on the Adriatic. A reasonably-priced car rental gave me the freedom to explore its entire Adriatic coastline as well as the interior to the Appenine mountains.

Not insignificantly, the car rental included a rescue service, which came in somewhat handy when – on a darkening Easter Sunday afternoon – Hertz’s agent drove some 40 miles to jump-start my dead-as-a-dodo car at the top of a steep and winding dirt road just recently opened after the winter’s snows. None of those that helped me – from the keeper of Mount Sibilla’s wooden refugio, to the mechanic who drove from Sarnano – spoke a lick of English, and their reaction to my crash-course Italian was all sympathy and no understanding. But somehow we managed to communicate enough with our animated “humanspeak” to get the job done.

I have an indelible picture – as we waited for the mechanic in the deepening gloom and dropping temperature – of the refugio manager’s nonna, clad in quintessential black and with a back so bent that it made me stand up extra-straight to compensate. Every now and then she would wander off, wordlessly, face fixed on the ground, in no apparent direction, but seemingly summoned by a silent, beckoning call. Her granddaughter’s response – to the consternation of my formal, respect-thy-elders upbringing – was swift and scathing, scolding her back into her assigned rank with a sharpness that she (nonna) reacted to in the same way that she appeared to react to everything: as if it hadn’t happened. Such is the wisdom of our elders.

Marche captivated me, from the singular and dramatic seascape around Monte Conero, to the grandeur of Ascoli Piceno’s Piazza del Popolo; from the mist-shrouded statue of Francesco di Assissi on Sasso Simone, to Emperor Augustus’ two-thousand-year-old entrance gate to Fano at the end of the first road to reach the Adriatic from Rome. Brodetto on the coast, olive all’ascolana in Macerata, and a lot more than the renowned Verdichhio and Rosso Conero to savor it with in the unassuming trattoria or osteria that every hilltop town offers as a fixture of its architecture.

In short, it was for me a revelation, a discovery of a world that I never knew existed. That was probably what clinched it for me – a place where we could get away from the masses, and still have it all right there, and in a form perhaps more authentic than any tourist-throbbing hub such as Firenze or Venezia or Roma. And if we ever wanted to explore the undoubted jewels of those places, we could get in a car and be there in a matter of hours.

And so Marche it was, and now is…