Le Marche as a plural region

Le Marche region was defined the Plural Region! Why? First, there is a geographic reason. Le Marche region is a sort of chessboard, divided into several sectors. There are at least four different vertical “stripes”: the sea, the plain, the hill and the mountain. There are also a series of rivers, horizontally: Foglia, Arzilla, Metauro, Cesano, Misa, Esino, Musone, Potenza, Chienti, Tenna and so on and so forth – sounds like a geography text, I know, but geography matters! -. The most various Italian region came out from this puzzle of different hills, climatic areas and crop. Therefore, you can find a very high density of cities and historic towns: see Fano, Corinaldo, Numana, Loreto, Camerino, Fabriano, Acqualagna, Recanati, Senigallia… hundreds! That means an exaggerated amount of Villages and Castles, and Museum too (more than three hundreds, one of my favourite the Museum of Paper in Fabriano).

Le Marche region passed through a lot of historical facts – from prehistoric cave to Piceni people -. Every court or free municipality had its own tradition and Today you can still find dozens of demonstrations, palios, quarters, parades… every place has its own champions and its excellence: the painter Raffaello is from Urbino, the poet Leopardi from Recanati, the composer Pergolesi from Jesi and the composer Rossini from Pesaro. This great variety means lots of gastronomic traditions too: the typical products from Le Marche are more than a hundred. I loved the Moretta di Fano, an explosive mix of liquor, sugar and coffee. It was used by fishermen to stay alert during the night, it seems that it is still used in some clinical resuscitation, not good for hypertensive people, definitely.

A tour around Le Marche region is a small tour of the whole Italy, you know!

Patrizio Roversi