Heading for the Adriatic Coast – Riviera del Cònero, Marche

Sunday, June 26, 2005

Along the Adriatic coast of Italy, just below the port city of Ancona, northeast of Perugia, in the shadow of Monte Cònero, lies a beautiful and relatively undiscovered area known as the Riviera del Cònero. We made a spontaneous decision middle of last week to rent a car and spend a few days “al mare” (at the sea). On Wednesday afternoon we talked with our neighbor Catherine who lived in the Marche region for 3 years and therefore is quite versed on what to see and where to go for a great beach experience. She recommended a local car rental place with better rates than we had found on the Internet. We made no reservations, planning on finding a place when we got there, since it is still a bit early in the season. We were told that things don’t get crowded until July and August at the seaside.

We had a last dinner planned with our young European friends from school for Sunday evening so we planning to be back on Saturday night. Eva and Helena are going home at the end of this week, so we wanted to take them to dinner as a sort of farewell. We thought that if we arrived mid-day Thursday, we would have enough time to enjoy the sea and have a taste of this area we had heard so much about.

The challenge of not owning a car and using public transportation is that in order to rent a car, one must first find the rental place – by bus. It ended up being further outside centro than we thought and we got off the bus too soon. After wandering around a while we went into a bar (remember, in Italy, this is a place that serves coffee, pastries and sandwiches), ordered a cappuccino and a brioche and asked the young woman working there if she knew where it was. Not only did she know, Gianluca who owns the place – called Rent for Less – is a friend of hers! She gave us good directions, including how to get another bus to take us the rest of the way. This time we missed our stop and had to walk back a few blocks! No harm done, except for getting kind of sweaty. Summer has definitely arrived in Italy. We understand the temperatures are high now all over Europe and we were happy to be leaving and heading for the beach, and in air-conditioned comfort.

We had a fun conversation with Gianluca about America and scuba diving and the Adriatic Coast where he was born. By 10am we were on our way. He insisted on giving us a motorcycle escort to the freeway entrance, saying that it was too complicated to explain and easier for him to just show us.

For the next few hours we enjoyed all the beautiful scenery between Perugia and the sea. I feel like a broken record to keep using the work “breathtaking” to describe Italy’s countryside but that is exactly what it is. The sunflowers are blooming now and we passed brilliant rolling hills, as far as the eye could see, covered with “girasoli” (the Italian word for sunflowers), rising up and over hillsides, down in valleys, separated by crops of leafy greens, corn and wheat fields. At one place, next to a field of red poppies, mixed with little white flowers was a wheat field. Bob was busy photographing the poppies when I excitedly called to him, in very poor English “This is a whole wheat field!” (meaning all wheat, and excitedly because, as a kid growing up in Brooklyn I had never seen a field of wheat in person!) He looked at me and sarcastically said, “Is that a pun?” We laughed a lot and I realized what I had said and also that it WAS the whole wheat! This is the first time we have understood the expression “amber waves of grain” as breezes rustled through the golden hills.

Buona Giornata,
Rosemary & Bob

(to be continued: see “Arriving in Sirolo – Riviera del Cònero”)