Italy's most classic landscape
With beaches, rolling orchards and a string of mountains, the Marches rolls all the elements of Italy's landscape into one package. In his 1957 book Viaggio in Italia, the writer G. Piovene declared, "if you want to identify Italy's most typical landscape, you'd have to choose the Marches … Italy, with its landscapes, is a distillation of the world; the Marches [is a distillation] of Italy."
Over 100 miles of coastline stretch down the eastern shore, from white sand beaches like the "velvet beach" in Senigallia to towering black cliffs that curve around blue coves. Beyond the occasional inland city, the interior is largely uninhabited. Countless acres of virgin woods, especially oak forests, reflect the relative lack of development in the region. Famously thick woods used to cover the region. Now they occupy 16 percent, which still makes for larger tracts of unexplored land than in neighboring Tuscany and Umbria. Protected indigenous animals such as Appenine wolves, foxes, Orsini vipers (which share a name with an equally infamous medieval family) and golden eagles have diminished in recent years as forests are cleared, but can still be seen on hikes in the Appenines and in the rougher Sibylline mountains.
Carved out underneath the Marches' extensive forests is a breathtaking series of caves littered with shiny, enamel-like stalagmites and stalactites thought to be 1.4 million years old. The Frasassi Caves were fully explored in 1971 and were immediately judged to be the largest in Europe. The first chamber, called the Ancona Abyss, is approximately 600 feet high, 500 feet wide and 400 feet long-large enough to fit your average medieval cathedral comfortably inside. Serious spelunkers can join guides for in-depth excursions of the caves; there are also frequent walking tours for those who prefer not to crawl through the caves' tight spaces.

Surf and turf
There are two major themes in the region's cuisine: mare e monti (sea and mountains). The active fishing industry provides one-tenth of Italy's national fish catch and one-seventh of its national shellfish supply. Every coastal city in the Marches is proud of its brodetto, a humble name (meaning little broth) that indicates what is usually a very lavish fish soup. Il brodetto di Ancona, from the region's capital, contains no less than 13 types of fish and seafood. Moving inland, the focus turns toward high-quality produce, fruit and meat. A strong organic farming movement has taken hold in the Marches and is supported by the regional government, although many of the local conventional growing techniques are de facto organic. These natural, pesticide-free techniques have been applied to apple, peach and cherry orchards, as well as grains, olives and grapes. Organic pasta is widely available, made from specially grown wheat that's stone ground by hand. Some winemakers produce organic red and white wines, and there's even local beer brewed from organic barley.
The cuisine of the region centers around many of the most classic Central Italian flavors: homemade egg noodles such as tagliatelle; flavored, slow-roasted meats such as the garlic-and-herb-stuffed pork known as porchetta (which some claim originated in the region); elaborate baked pastas such as vincisgrassi, made with fresh egg noodles, meat sauce, creamy béchamel and Parmigiano-Reggiano; mild pecorino (sheep's milk) cheese with hints of herbs and acorn; other cheeses such as the mixed cow's and sheep's milk Casciotta d'Urbino; plus rabbit, veal and black truffle dishes.
The Marches' foods have an unusually prominent emphasis on poultry-both game birds such as quail and pigeon, and farm-raised birds such as its famous free-range roosters.

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