The 6 best towns you can get around without steps in Marche

Mercatello sul Metauro

Why visit Mercatello sul Metauro

The upper Metauro valley here sits within the Massa Trabaria, the medieval district that supplied beams for Roman and papal building, and the site itself has older layers still. Etruscans and then Romans held the ground, where it stood between the municipia of Tiferno Metaurense and Tiferno Tiberino under the name Pieve d'Ico.

The town became an autonomous commune in 1235 under a bull of Pope Gregory IX, and within fifty years walls had risen around it and the name had changed to Mercatello sul Metauro. The pieve, exempt from any bishop since 1180 and answering only to the Holy See, sits on the square along with the town hall, forming the axis around which the walled center still reads as a single composition.

That square and its buildings earned the borgo its place among the Borghi più belli d'Italia in 2018. What the valley setting, the papal bull, the walls and the exempt pieve add up to is a town whose shape and status were fixed almost in a single generation, tied to a jurisdiction and a building material trade that both reached well beyond its own small perimeter, and have changed little since.

What to see in Mercatello sul Metauro

• Pieve Collegiata dei Santi Pietro e Paolo. Romanesque church whose facade was rebuilt in 1927 on the 1363 plan. Under Holy See dependence its jurisdiction reached forty-seven churches and chapels scattered through the surrounding valley.
• Piazza Garibaldi. Main square of the medieval borgo, faced by the pieve, the town hall and the seventeenth-century Palazzo Gasparini.
• Mura medievali. Thirteenth-century walls built within fifty years of the 1235 charter, still defining the perimeter of the centro storico.

How to get to Mercatello sul Metauro

Rimini is about 1 h 30 min away by road.

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Sassoferrato

Why visit Sassoferrato

Sassoferrato sits on the eastern slope of the Apennines on two levels: the Borgo at around 310 meters and the Castello at 400 meters, dominated by the Rocca built in 1365 by order of Cardinal Albornoz. A kilometer south of the modern town lies Sentinum, the Roman city next to which the consuls Publius Decius Mus and Fabius Maximus Rullianus defeated a coalition of Samnites, Etruscans, Umbrians and Senone Gauls in 295 BC, in the decisive battle of the Third Samnite War that allowed Rome to unify central Italy.

The archaeological park preserves the cardo and decumanus, the urban baths, a second extramural bath complex and the ruins of a metalworking shop. The Civic Archaeological Museum inside the Palazzo dei Priori, built 1355, holds the finds from Sentinum, including a Byzantine Saint Demetrius mosaic icon on wooden support.

Giovanni Battista Salvi, called Il Sassoferrato, was born here in 1609; Palazzo Oliva holds a collection of his Raphaelesque devotional paintings. The town gives its name to the Battle of the Nations historical reenactment, held each August.

What to see in Sassoferrato

• Rocca Albornoz. Fourteenth-century fortress built 1365 by order of Cardinal Albornoz, dominating the upper Castello district at 400 meters.
• Parco Archeologico di Sentinum. Roman city a kilometer south of town, with the cardo and decumanus, the urban baths and the extramural bath complex still visible.
• Museo Civico Archeologico. Inside the 1355 Palazzo dei Priori, holding the finds from Sentinum and the Byzantine Saint Demetrius mosaic icon on wooden support.

How to get to Sassoferrato

Perugia is about 1 h 14 min away by road.

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Mondolfo

Why visit Mondolfo

Mondolfo sits at 144 meters on a ridge above the Adriatic between Pesaro and Senigallia, with the coastal frazione on the beach four kilometers below. A Byzantine castle stood here in the sixth and seventh centuries, and the present settlement formed around it in the early eleventh, when the Montoffo feudal family gave the town its name.

The Malatesta took the castle in the fourteenth century, then Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta lost it to Pope Pius II in 1463, at which point the walls and bastion that still anchor the southwest corner were rebuilt. The friary and church at the heart of the old town were rebuilt twice, first by Antonio di Pietro da Vercelli in 1466 and again under Domenico da Como in 1593.

Mondolfo joined the Borghi più belli d'Italia and holds recognitions for both its coast and its farmland. The town is a single history in two elevations: the ridge held the castle and later the fortified center, while the shore below, reached across the four kilometers of farmland now recognized for its management, grew into the seafront community that carries the coastal recognitions today.

What began as a Byzantine strongpoint and passed through Malatesta and papal hands still reads as a hill town looking down at its own beach.

What to see in Mondolfo

• Mura Roveresche. Roughly 600 meters of fifteenth-century walls and the south-west bastion, redesigned by the Della Rovere for early artillery defense after 1463.
• Complesso Monumentale di Sant'Agostino. Augustinian friary and church from the late thirteenth century, rebuilt in 1466 and again in 1593, now home to the civic museum and the Sant'Agostino complex.
• Centro storico. Walled hill borgo with narrow streets, the Palazzo del Comune and the Chiesa di Santa Giustina at the heart of the perimeter.

How to get to Mondolfo

It has its own railway station. Ancona is about 44 min away by road. The full route from Bologna.

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Porto San Giorgio

Why visit Porto San Giorgio

The town sits on the central Adriatic between Ancona and Pescara, the working port and the holiday beach of the Fermo valley. The lower town by the water was settled as the harbor of the older inland Fermo, and the castle that still stands above the harbor was built in 1267 by Lorenzo Tiepolo, then Fermo's podestà.

The historic center sits slightly back from the sea, holding the 1818 civic theater and a small but lively summer calendar of seafood festivals, while the seafront itself runs a different register: marina, beach, and the Liberty-era promenade under date palms and umbrella pines, laid out parallel to the sand behind the row of bathing stations. What the layout adds up to is a town divided cleanly by function rather than by age: an inland-facing historic core that keeps the theater and the festival calendar, and a shoreline built in layers from the 13th-century defensive castle down through the Liberty-era promenade to the modern marina and beach, each addition sitting seaward of the last.

What to see in Porto San Giorgio

• Rocca Tiepolo. Brick castle with a squat profile and surviving towers, built by Lorenzo Tiepolo to defend the port. It stands as the historic anchor of the seafront, the oldest fixed point on a shoreline otherwise given over to modern bathing establishments.
• Spiaggia (Bandiera Blu). The Bandiera Blu beach runs two kilometers of fine sand on a gentle shelf, lined with classic Adriatic stabilimenti balneari. One of the central Adriatic's reliable family beaches.
• Porto turistico. The marina holds moorings alongside a working fishing fleet that still lands its catch at dawn, so pleasure craft and working boats share the same water.

How to get to Porto San Giorgio

It has its own railway station. Ancona is about 48 min away by road.

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Grottammare

Why visit Grottammare

Grottammare sits on the Ascoli Piceno coast at the mouth of the Tesino. The town splits into two nuclei that never merged: a lungomare on the Adriatic, laid out with palms and Liberty villas in the late nineteenth century, and an older settlement on the hill above, reached by climbing away from the water rather than along it.

Felice Peretti was born in that upper settlement on 13 December 1521, in a house on what became the borgo's central square. He left, rose through the church, and returned as Pope Sixtus V only in monument: two churches he commissioned for his birthplace after 1585, one built beside the house itself and one now holding the collection of objects he sent back from Rome.

The upper town still carries its eleventh-century walls and the traces of an earlier fortress on the Incasato spur, and it has been named among the Borghi più belli d'Italia. The coast below has its own separate recognitions, for water quality and for the management of the hills behind it.

The two halves read as a single biography split in space: the hill holds the birth and the memory, the shore holds the later invention of the town as a seaside resort, and neither nucleus explains itself without the other.

What to see in Grottammare

• Paese Alto (Borgo Antico). Brick lanes climb the Incasato hill inside the eleventh-century walls, past the remains of a fortified spur that looks down over the seafront below.
• Chiesa di Santa Lucia. On the central square of the upper town, next to the house of Peretti's birth, a plain sixteenth-century commission from a native son grown powerful.
• Museo Sistino. Inside the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista, the liturgical objects on display came back to the town only after the local boy had become pope.

How to get to Grottammare

It has its own railway station. Pescara is about 1 h away by road.

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Senigallia

Why visit Senigallia

Senigallia sits at the mouth of the Misa river on the Adriatic, twenty-five kilometers north of Ancona. The centro storico gathers along the river's right bank, where the arcades face the water, while the fortress stands apart as the town's layered military record, built up over two centuries by successive rulers rather than in one campaign.

The beach runs south from this old core as a separate register of the town entirely, thirteen kilometers of it, with the pier pavilion marking the center of that beachfront and the restaurant anchoring its southern end. The photographer worked in the town all his life, and the permanent section of his prints sits inland in the Palazzo del Duca rather than anywhere near the coast he might have photographed.

The market arcade, built in the nineteenth century, still does the ordinary work of feeding the town between the historic river frontage and the modern beach economy. Senigallia reads, then, as three towns joined at the river mouth: a fortified old center, a nineteenth-century civic one, and a twentieth-century coastline, each still doing the job it was built for.

What to see in Senigallia

• Spiaggia di Velluto. The Bandiera Blu beach, working spine of the town's summer, its sand fine enough underfoot to explain the name.
• Rocca Roveresca. Layered fortress combining Albornoz's fourteenth-century Rocchetta, the 1450 Malatesta keep and the Della Rovere completion by Laurana and Pontelli.
• Rotonda a Mare. Art-deco pier pavilion completed 1933, set on iron piles above the water at the center of the beachfront, restored and used for exhibitions and weddings.

How to get to Senigallia

It has its own railway station. Ancona is about 41 min away by road. The full route from Bologna.

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