One of the best things about moving to a new region is that every trip out of the house becomes an adventure. Le Marche, unlike its more famous cousins in Tuscany and Umbria, doesn’t really have iconic centres such as Florence or Siena or Assisi which are always an immediate draw for tourists, a ‘tick’ on the itinerary not to be missed. In Le Marche, you have to be a bit more resourceful and a bit more self-starting. At first this can be a little daunting – so in our first weeks and months we would set ourselves little, almost situational, missions: ‘Today we will drive for 55 minutes in a north-easterly direction, stop, and explore wherever we end up.’ Sometimes these trips would take us to the edge of a big town, sometimes the middle of a village, sometimes to even more the middle of nowhere than where we’d come from. All, though, had something to offer; if you are up for an adventure you will surely have one.
But that’s probably not much help for anyone trying to plan a holiday!
So on to a couple of specific gems we found. Fermo, balanced on a hill near the Adriatic Sea, has breathtaking 360° views of the surrounding countryside and the coast. Its main piazza is one of the oldest and best preserved in Italy and I’d defy anyone not to get bliss’ed out with an hour’s people watching in one of the piazza’s cafes. The Fermo theatre is also a classic of its kind, highly ornate with a column of vertiginous boxes, and seeing an opera there is really a must. The opera season favours quality over quantity so there are maybe only a handful of shows a year, but they are excellent. And you can get 
very cheap tickets if you are prepared to stand at the back of one of the boxes (from where you get a perfectly good view).
Ascoli Piceno has a piazza made entirely from travertine, a very particular kind of Italian marble. If anyone has visited the Getty centre in Los Angeles, they might be interested to know that the whole place is made of the stuff, shipped over especially from Italian quarries, and chosen for its gorgeous texture and the way it plays with light. I don’t technically know how to describe it, but I’ve always loved those book covers which are somewhere between matt and gloss in finish – and travertine is the stony equivalent. It looks even more beautiful if it has just rained – so rush there if there is a shower and enjoy the sheen as you sip an unfeasibly thick hot chocolate (its basically chocolate, heated) from the lovely art deco bar on the corner.
This time of year is also when Castellucio, a tiny village perched in the middle of the mountains, boasts a display of flowers that would make the Dutch blush. The whole valley – a flattened bowl which is all that remains of an ancient lake – is filled with flowers of every colour as far as the eye can see. The whole fantastic display only lasts two or three weeks but the memory lasts forever. And even if you thought it was impossible to be excited by a lentil, Castellucio is famous for them and one sip of a lentilly broth in one of the humble but excellent village eateries is sure to have you beating at the door of their ever-growing fan club.
