Europe Fall 2024 - Getting Down To Work In the Ancona Area

Wife and I are in Italy for a purpose. She has discussed this on her blog. We are looking for another place where we can stay for a long period of time as part of the transformation of our travel life into something more sustainable for our age. This is not an easy task. With all our traveling over the last decade, we've only found two places that really resonate with us for staying a longer period; Cefalú in Sicily, and El Campello in Spain. What do these two have in common that we enjoy so much?

• They are on the Mediterranean with that desirable climate and ambiance.
• They have long beaches with seaside walks offering unobstructed views of the sea.
• There is ample rental housing with sea views.
• The 'tourist' section of each is rather narrow with a substantial 'normal' town behind it.
• Each has a wide variety of shopping including at least one or more supermarkets within walking distance so one can live and not require an automobile.
• The two towns are not 'A List' places. Yest they get tourists but they tend to be more European than international.
• The tourist seasons are short. Going (as we do) on the shoulders, means we can avoid a lot of the tourist chaos.

However, neither is perfect. We love Cefalú because there is a substantial Medieval old town side-by-side with the new town. This made for great early morning and early evening walking. However, it is on Sicily which means the options for doing things outside of the town are limited (it being on an island that we've extensively explored. There is little public transportation. It is not easy to get to.

El Campello, on the other hand, is a mirror image. It has no old town, which we miss. But there's good public transportation, is much easier to get to, and we are close via driving, train, or plane to all kinds of things we haven't seen.

So this trip is hopefully, to find a place that has it all...particularly in Italy, as we love Italian cuisine above just about all others. Honestly, given how few places we've found in all our travels that really resonate with us, we are not terribly optimistic.

We are focusing our search on the eastern, Adriatic coast of Italy. The west coast is filled with far more 'A' list locations and is more crowded and expensive. We started up north in the area between Venice and Trieste. Now we are working in the Marche region around the city of Ancona

We originally planned to just move around from place to place, stay in hotels as needed each night, and if we found a place that resonated, we'd look for a longer stay to test it out. Just 5 days of staying in hotels (having forgotten about our mutually conflicting sleep patterns) quickly disabused us of that plan. Plus we just don't like staying in hotels. We need more room to spread out. So we've switched to renting apartments and things are much mellower. 

So far nothing we've seen has floated our boat.

First stop

Long walkway along the sea with an ample 'normal' town behind it.

However, every single inch of beach front was covered with umbrellas and chairs you need to pay for!

Literally these go on, and on, and on. There is not a clear view of the ocean to be had!

There was an old fortress but not an old town

There was an 18th century church that was mostly forgettable with the exception of

CAPITALS

Name this capital style correctly and get entered into our EL COMPELLO GUEST STAY SWEEPSTAKES where you can visit us in October. (Spoiler Alert - Doric? Ionian? Corinthian?)

We went to two more towns that clearly didn't fit the bill. Numana which had another swath of miles long, beach umbrella/chair covered coast and a town on a hill that wasn't old and wasn't easy to walk to the ocean. Then there was Falconara Marittima which was a dreary town whose entire water front was cut off by train lines.

But, I do want to give you some pictures from where we are staying, a small beach town of Marina de Montemarciano. It is nice in that it doesn't have the crazy overbuilt development of commercial umbrellas and chairs, but there is nothing really around it so would not be a place we'd want to stay long-term.

Our house

Inside

The Hood

Scenes from around the Hood

Fishing

Rare sighting of Espouses Fotograficus Italiano

We noted there were ships constantly anchored not far down the coast. Then as we were driving we saw an oil refinery. This is clearly an offloading/on loading are for tankers.

Finally, we were checking out a restaurant which Google said was open.

Seems Google is missing some information