Discovering Le Marche in Italy: Food & Street Art in Ancona

You’ve been planning Italy trips for years. You know Rome is exhausting in August. You know Florence is genuinely beautiful but that a decent trattoria near Piazza della Repubblica now charges €28 for cacio e pepe that would cost €12 anywhere outside the tourist corridor. You’ve started looking for alternatives.

Most people land on Puglia, which is excellent but increasingly well-known. Some try the Cinque Terre, which is overcrowded by 10am in June. Almost nobody looks at Le Marche. That’s exactly why you should.

I stumbled into Ancona by accident — it was supposed to be one night before a ferry to Split. I stayed four days. Here’s what I found.

Why Le Marche Has Stayed Off the Map (And What That Means for Visitors)

Le Marche is the region. Ancona is the capital. The region runs down the central Adriatic coast bounded by the Apennines to the west, which has historically made it harder to reach from the main north-south axis of Italian tourism. No high-speed rail hub. No obvious cultural hook like Tuscany’s Renaissance art or Sicily’s Greek temples. Just a place that developed its own food culture, its own architectural personality, and its own pace without the interference of mass tourism shaping it from the outside.

The tourist infrastructure that does exist is aimed at Italians from Milan and Bologna driving down for summer beach holidays. That means restaurants serve local taste. Wine lists feature producers from within 40km. The seafood is bought locally because the Adriatic is right there and any alternative would be absurd.

How Ancona Compares to Other Adriatic Cities

Compare it honestly to Rimini, the obvious reference point. Rimini has real Roman history — the Arch of Augustus, the Tempio Malatestiano — but it’s fundamentally defined by the beach resort strip stretching north and south of the city. The food scene serves summer tourists. Ancona hasn’t made that compromise.

Bari, on the opposite Adriatic coast, gets the most press as the authentic port city worth visiting. Bari is genuinely good, particularly the Città Vecchia, but it’s now well enough known that tourist infrastructure has caught up with the reputation. Ancona is a cycle behind. Whether that changes depends partly on how much gets written about it — I’m aware of the irony here.

The Monte Conero Natural Park about 15km south keeps the surrounding coastline from developing the way Rimini’s hinterland did. The cliffs at Portonovo are protected. The beaches stay clean and genuinely uncrowded through May and September. That shapes how the city sees itself.

What WWII Left Behind: The Architecture Question

Ancona was heavily bombed during the Second World War and substantially rebuilt in the postwar decades. Parts of the city are architecturally unremarkable — 1950s and 1960s housing blocks that are decent but not what you came to photograph.

Don’t let that put you off. The Roman, medieval, and Renaissance structures survived better than you’d expect. The Rione Guasco neighborhood climbing toward San Ciriaco Cathedral is as atmospheric as anything in central Italy. And that postwar rebuilding created large blank walls on working-class blocks — Piano San Lazzaro most notably — that decades of street artists have been filling in ever since. The neighborhoods that weren’t designed for tourism are exactly the ones where genuine culture develops. You see the same pattern in Naples, in Marseille, in Porto.

A Working Orientation: Three Areas That Matter

The city divides into three practical zones. The historic center around Piazza del Plebiscito is where you eat and drink. The port area, anchored by the Mole Vanvitelliana pentagonal fortress, is where you walk in the mornings and find the densest street art concentration. The Passetto promontory at the southern end is where you climb for the best views in the city — worth doing once, ideally at dusk.

Half a day per zone gives you a solid framework for two full days in Ancona before you consider going anywhere else in the region.

Eating in Ancona: What’s Real and What to Skip

Brodetto all’anconetana is the dish that defines this city. It’s a fish stew made with exactly 13 types of seafood — the number is traditional and the locals treat it seriously — built on a base that includes white wine vinegar, which cuts through the richness in a way no other Italian fish stew does. Order this wherever you see it on a menu. The restaurants near the ferry terminal entrance that push generic seafood pasta at tourists getting off boats charge twice as much and taste half as good.

Osteria del Pozzo on Via Bonda has been open since 1897. The menu is short because everything on it is good. Brodetto, vincisgrassi, rotating antipasti. Budget €35–45 per person with wine and book ahead for Friday and Saturday evenings. Don’t show up unannounced on a weekend expecting a table.

The Wine to Order With Everything

Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi is the local white and it’s built for this food. High acidity, saline mineral finish, dry without being austere. It cuts through the vinegar-heavy brodetto in a way that makes the pairing feel designed rather than coincidental. Umani Ronchi and Garofoli are the two producers to look for — both widely available by the glass at €5–8 in better Ancona restaurants, both selling bottles directly at their estates if you’re driving through the Jesi area, about 30km west of the city.

If someone offers you Pinot Grigio with the brodetto, politely decline.

Morning Provisions: The Mercato delle Erbe

The Mercato delle Erbe on Via Mazzini is the covered market where Ancona actually shops. Open mornings Tuesday through Saturday, closing around noon. This is where you buy ciauscolo, local pecorino, and olive ascolane to eat on the train home. Arrive before 11am — vendors start winding down by 11:30 and the selection drops off fast in the last hour. The produce here is genuinely regional in a way supermarkets aren’t.

The Street Art in Ancona: Where to Look and What to Expect

Nobody should come to Ancona specifically for street art. That expectation would set most people up for disappointment. But if you’re already there for the food and the atmosphere of a real working port, you’ll find a varied and genuine mural scene across several neighborhoods. Not Shoreditch. Not Wynwood. Better than both in specific stretches and messier in others. Here’s where to go:

1. Piano San Lazzaro — The densest concentration in the city. A working-class hillside district above the historic center where large-scale murals cover the sides of apartment blocks: political work, abstract pieces, portrait murals. Walk up Via Marconi and explore the surrounding streets. Allow a full hour and bring comfortable shoes — it’s steep and the best pieces are up the hill.
2. Port area near the Mole Vanvitelliana — The pentagonal Venetian-era lazzaretto is worth visiting regardless of any art; it now functions as an exhibition and event space. The warehouse walls around the port entrance have accumulated layered work over years: large pieces, throwups, stencils. Uneven in quality. Completely genuine.
3. Via XXIX Settembre corridor — Smaller pieces concentrated in a few blocks, mostly stencil work and paste-ups. Worth 20 minutes if you’re already in the central area and looking for it.
4. Rione Guasco below San Ciriaco Cathedral — Steep medieval streets climbing toward the Romanesque cathedral have scattered murals mixed into the stonework. Sometimes the combination is striking. Sometimes it’s jarring. Go anyway — the views from the top of Rione Guasco are the best in Ancona and the climb is short enough to do without planning.
5. Around the Arco di Traiano — The Roman triumphal arch near the port is free to see and genuinely impressive on its own terms. Nearby walls have accumulated smaller pieces and tags over the years. Not the reason to go there, but the arch absolutely should be on your route.

The work here changes — murals get painted over, new ones appear. What I found in autumn may not be what you find. That’s part of what makes it worth looking for.

Skip August. This Is Non-Negotiable.

August in Ancona means heat, reduced restaurant hours, and half the city on holiday — including the owners of the places you actually want to eat at. Come in May, June, late September, or October. The food scene runs at full capacity, the weather is good without being punishing, and you can get a table at Osteria del Pozzo without booking three weeks in advance.

Getting to Ancona and Around Le Marche: Practical Questions

How hard is Ancona to reach from the rest of Italy?

Trenitalia runs direct Intercity trains from Roma Termini to Ancona in about 3 hours. From Bologna it’s closer to 2 hours on the same line. Falconara Marittima airport, 15km from the city, handles Ryanair and Wizz Air routes from certain northern European cities, but domestic connections are limited. If you’re already in Italy, the train is easier and more reliable than routing through a regional airport.

Do you need a car to see Le Marche properly?

For Ancona itself, no. Everything worth seeing for food and street art is walkable or a short cab ride. For the broader region — Urbino, Macerata, the Verdicchio wine country around Jesi, the Conero Riviera — a rental car becomes useful. Day rates from Ancona station run €45–70 for a compact car, which is standard for Italy and splits easily across two people.

Is Le Marche significantly cheaper than Tuscany?

Yes. Meaningfully so. Dinner for two with wine at a good Ancona restaurant runs €60–80 total. Equivalent quality in Florence or Siena starts at €100 and reaches €130–150 easily. Hotel rooms in Ancona’s centro storico come in at €80–130 per night for solid three-star options — roughly half what you’d pay in central Bologna for similar quality. Le Marche isn’t budget travel, but the gap with Italy’s most-visited regions is real and consistent.

What else in the region is worth extending the trip for?

Urbino is the obvious answer — 90 minutes by bus from Ancona, Raphael’s birthplace, home to one of the finest Renaissance ducal palaces in the country, still functioning as a university town in a way that keeps it grounded rather than museum-like. The Grotte di Frasassi, about an hour inland, are among the largest cave systems in Europe and dramatically undervisited. Macerata hosts an outdoor opera festival held in a Roman amphitheater each July. The Conero Riviera south of Ancona has limestone cliffs and genuinely clean water from June through September.

As Italy’s most famous regions get harder to visit well — expensive, crowded, increasingly optimized for content creation rather than eating and walking — the places that developed without that pressure become more worth finding. Le Marche is one of them. Ancona is where most people start, and where most people should probably stay longer than they planned.