The best hill towns with a serious restaurant in Marche

Acqualagna

Why visit Acqualagna

Acqualagna sits at 204 meters in the Metauro valley, twelve kilometers from Urbino, on the plain just downstream from the gorge cut by the Candigliano river. The Roman city of Pitinum Mergens stood nearby until Alaric's Goths destroyed it; the survivors founded Montefalcone, the castle from which today's village grew.

The name Acqualagna comes from Aqua Lanea, water of slaughter, after the sixth-century battle fought on that same plain. Three fairs anchor the year: black truffle on the last Sunday of February, summer black on the last Sunday of July, white truffle across the last weekend of October and the two that follow.

The town below and the gorge above read as one unit, a river valley that has carried Roman road traffic, monastic settlement and truffle trade in turn, each leaving its mark on the ground without erasing what came before.

Anticofurlo have been named by a guide.

What to see in Acqualagna

• Gola del Furlo. The gorge narrows between Monte Paganuccio (977 m) and Monte Pietralata (888 m); the 38-meter Roman tunnel, cut in 76 AD, is still driven through by the Via Flaminia today.
• Abbazia di San Vincenzo al Furlo. Medieval Benedictine monastery set into the slopes above the gorge, counted among the oldest religious foundations in the Metauro valley.
• Riserva Naturale Statale Gola del Furlo. Nature reserve established in 2001, covering 3,600 hectares of woodland, grazing land and ridgeline above the river.

How to get to Acqualagna

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Rimini is roughly 81 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Acqualagna

Offida

Why visit Offida

Offida sits at 293 meters on a cliff between the Tesino and Tronto valleys, twenty-three kilometers from Ascoli Piceno. The Chiesa di Santa Maria della Rocca rises on a rock spur at the western edge of the village, surrounded on three sides by cliffs that drop into two valleys: a Romanesque-Gothic temple in brick and travertine, raised by Master Albertino in 1330 on an older Benedictine foundation, with a double row of trilobed arches around the apse.

Inside, the apse and transept hold the fresco cycle of the Master of Offida, an anonymous monk painter who carried Giotto's lesson through the Rimini school, with the Marriage of Saint Catherine and Saint Christopher dated by inscription to 1367. Bobbin lace, merletto a tombolo, has been worked in town since the fifteenth century; the Museo del Merletto in Palazzo De Castellotti holds the collection.

The Carnevale Storico, with the Bove finto run and the Vlurd fire bundles, dates from before Lent in early February.

Osteria Ophis, Blob Caffè & Ristorante have been named by a guide.

What to see in Offida

• Chiesa di Santa Maria della Rocca. Romanesque-Gothic brick-and-travertine church raised in 1330 by Master Albertino on a rock spur west of town, with the Master of Offida fresco cycle dated 1367 in the transept.
• Museo del Merletto a Tombolo. Inside Palazzo De Castellotti, with the lace collection, tools, historical documents and demonstrations of the bobbin-lace work practiced in town since the fifteenth century.
• Palazzo Comunale. Civic palace on the long Piazza del Popolo, with a portico, the Teatro Serpente Aureo and the access to the Museo del Merletto and the archaeological museum.

How to get to Offida

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Pescara is roughly 74 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Offida

Treia

Why visit Treia

Treia stands at 342 meters in the hills between the Potenza and Chienti valleys, thirty-five kilometers from Ancona. The Roman town of Trea lay on the plateau below, a municipium founded shortly after 49 BC that flourished between Augustus and Antoninus Pius.

Around the year 1000 the population moved up to the more defensible hilltop of Montecchio, and the older site emptied. The new town stayed under the name Montecchio until 1790, when Pope Pius VI raised it to the rank of città and restored its Roman name.

The Piazza della Repubblica, on the highest point of the ridge, is closed at one end by the Cattedrale della Santissima Annunziata and at the other by Giuseppe Valadier's small Accademia Georgica, the eighteenth-century home of an agronomic academy founded in the fifteenth as the Accademia dei Sollevati. The Disfida del Bracciale, an Ottocento street-game in which four contrade compete, has filled the centro storico every first Sunday of August since 1978.

Il Casolare dei Segreti have been named by a guide.

What to see in Treia

• Piazza della Repubblica. Belvedere piazza on the highest point of the ridge, closed by the Cattedrale della Santissima Annunziata at one end and the Accademia Georgica at the other.
• Accademia Georgica. Eighteenth-century Giuseppe Valadier building housing an academy founded in the 1400s, with 1,196 parchments of the municipal archive and over 15,000 volumes.
• Santuario del Santissimo Crocifisso. Cesare Bazzani sanctuary completed in the early twentieth century on the site of an older parish church, holding a sixteenth-century Umbrian fresco and a thirteenth-century crucifix.

How to get to Treia

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Ancona is roughly 58 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Treia

Fossombrone

Why visit Fossombrone

Fossombrone sits on the Metauro river in the foothills of the central Apennines, 30 km inland from Pesaro. The site has been continuously occupied since the 8th century BC: a north-Piceno village, then a partial Celtic settlement, then the Roman colony founded around 120 BC by the consul Caius Sempronius Gracchus.

The town's layers sit stacked in physical order. The Roman city's remains lie in the flat ground just east of the modern centre.

Above it, the medieval and Renaissance town climbs a single long street to the ducal court at its summit. Lower down, the Casa Cattabrini and the cathedral anchor the centro storico by the river.

Upstream, 8 km from the centre, the Metauro narrows into the gorge that gives the town its wider setting, its cliffs cut through by the Roman engineers and now enclosed within a nature reserve. The geography explains the sequence: river valley first, road town second, fortified height last, each built on what the one before had left standing.

Osteria Zanchetti have been named by a guide.

What to see in Fossombrone

• Forum Sempronii (area archeologica). Excavations east of the modern centre reveal the forum, basilica and domus mosaics, with a continuous stratigraphy running from the north-Piceno village through the Roman imperial city. The Via Flaminia ran through the colony.
• Corte Alta. The palace begun by Federico da Montefeltro and completed under the Della Rovere dukes sits at the top of a single long street climbing from the lower town. It holds a small civic museum alongside the frescoed hall.
• Galleria del Furlo (76 AD). The tunnel runs 38 metres through limestone above the narrowing Metauro, with the gorge around it protected as a nature reserve, some of the wildest ground in the Marche.

How to get to Fossombrone

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Rimini is roughly 69 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Fossombrone

San Severino Marche

Why visit San Severino Marche

San Severino Marche sits at 235 meters in the Potenza valley, fifty kilometers southwest of Ancona, and the town is built in two distinct pieces rather than one continuous fabric. The medieval Castello occupies the hill above the town, still ringed by surviving city walls, while the Borgo below grew up around its own civic center on the valley floor.

The two parts do different jobs: the hill was governed and defended, walled and towered under the Smeducci dynasty through the fourteenth century, while the valley floor was built for markets and public life, organized around the wide colonnaded ellipse that still serves as the town's gathering space. The Salimbeni brothers, Lorenzo and Jacopo, were born in the town and worked across both halves of it, painting in a hilltop church and in a crypt-church alike, and their frescoes, along with a Vittore Crivelli polyptych, have since been gathered into a civic gallery in the lower town.

That movement of paintings from hill to valley mirrors the town's own shift in weight over time, from a fortified seat of government above to a civic and commercial center below, with the art now sitting closer to the square than to the walls that first sheltered it.

Cavallini have been named by a guide.

What to see in San Severino Marche

• Piazza del Popolo. The elliptical square anchors the lower town, its porticoes running unbroken around the full curve, giving the Borgo a single continuous gathering space rather than a scattering of smaller squares.
• Duomo Vecchio. The bell tower and the raised setting on Monte Nero are what register first, the cathedral standing above the walls rather than among them. Inside, the chapel that once held the Salimbeni Saint John cycle is now empty, the frescoes moved elsewhere in town.
• Torre degli Smeducci. The tower is the only structure on the hill that reads as purely defensive, plain where the church nearby is decorated, and it still dominates the skyline of the upper town.

How to get to San Severino Marche

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Ancona is roughly 71 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about San Severino Marche

Urbino

Why visit Urbino

Urbino sits at 451 meters in the Apennine foothills, seventy kilometers north of Perugia, its historic core spread across twin hills with the fortress on the higher of the two and the palace complex below on the other. Federico II da Montefeltro ruled from 1444 to 1482, and under him the town became one of the central courts of the Italian Renaissance: he was condottiere, diplomat, patron and humanist at once, and the building campaign he set running through the 1450s to the 1470s, first under Maso di Bartolomeo, gave the city the asymmetric silhouette that still defines it from a distance.

The university, founded in 1506, keeps that Renaissance investment active in the present rather than fossilized: the centro storico holds roughly 14,000 residents and around 14,000 enrolled students, so the old town runs on a population it did not have in the fifteenth century. The two hills, the ducal seat and the fortress above it, read as the same civic project seen from two elevations: one built to project a court outward, the other to hold the higher ground behind it.

What the 1998 inscription recognizes is that this pairing, court and citadel, survives largely as Federico left it.

Portanova have been named by a guide.

What to see in Urbino

• Palazzo Ducale. Federico da Montefeltro's Renaissance palace begun 1444, completed by Luciano Laurana with the twin torricini facade, now housing the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche.
• Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. One of the most important Renaissance painting collections in Italy, with Raffaello, Piero della Francesca's Flagellazione and Madonna di Senigallia, Paolo Uccello and Tiziano.
• Casa Natale di Raffaello. Fifteenth-century house on Via Raffaello where the painter was born in 1483 in the workshop of his father Giovanni Santi, now a museum of the early years.

How to get to Urbino

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Rimini is roughly 65 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Urbino

Recanati

Why visit Recanati

Recanati sits at 296 meters on a hill between the Potenza and Musone valleys, twenty-five kilometers south of Ancona and ten from the Adriatic. The town was founded around 1150 from the union of three earlier castles, Monte Morello, Monte San Vito and Monte Volpino, declared itself a free republic in 1290 and ran an international fair through the fifteenth century.

The poet lived above Piazza Sabato del Villaggio in the family library until 1822, and the hill behind the palace, hedge-bordered and looking toward the Sibillini and the sea, is the ground the writing came from; the medieval tower nearby, part of the Sant'Agostino complex, gave a later poem its perch. A tenor born in the same town more than half a century afterward is remembered a short distance away, his costumes and scores kept where the theater still stands.

What the hill town adds up to is a place small enough that a library, a hedge, and a tower could hold a life's landscape, and specific enough that the view from each still matches what was written about it.

Casa Bertini have been named by a guide.

What to see in Recanati

• Palazzo Leopardi. Eighteenth-century family palace where Giacomo Leopardi lived until 1822, with the preserved library of more than 20,000 volumes he read as a boy.
• Colle dell'Infinito. Hedge-bordered hill behind the palace, its panorama across the Musone valley toward the Sibillini and the Adriatic is what the hedge in the poem blocks from view.
• Torre del Passero Solitario. Thirteenth-century tower at the Sant'Agostino complex, the highest point of the centro storico, its silence is what gave Leopardi's solitary sparrow its perch.

How to get to Recanati

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Ancona is roughly 43 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Recanati

Fermo

Why visit Fermo

Fermo sits eight kilometers inland from the Adriatic and from the seaside frazione of Lido di Fermo, which holds the commune's Bandiera Blu: a hill town with its own beach attached at a distance, the two connected by the same municipal boundary but separated in character and elevation. The Roman colony of Firmum Picenum was founded on the hilltop in 264 BC after the conquest of the Picentes, with six thousand Latin colonists settled there.

In the tenth century the town became the capital of the Marchia Firmana, the territorial label that eventually gave the region its name. The historic center still reads as a hilltop capital looking down toward a coast it administers rather than touches.

What began as a Latin colony on high ground, gained a name that outgrew it and spread to the whole region, and kept its port at arm's length: the distance between the hill and the shore is not incidental but the shape of how Fermo has always held its territory.

Emilio, L'Enoteca Bar a Vino have been named by a guide.

What to see in Fermo

• Cisterne Romane. Thirty barrel-vaulted rooms in three parallel rows under the historic center, opus signinum waterproofing still in place, built to hold 15,000 cubic meters of water.
• Piazza del Popolo. The porticoes meet at the head of the square where the Palazzo dei Priori stands, the arrangement that has organized the civic center since the medieval period.
• Palazzo dei Priori. Built in 1296 by joining a thirteenth-century palace and a church, housing the Pinacoteca Civica, the Sala del Mappamondo and the Sixtus V bronze statue.

How to get to Fermo

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Ancona is roughly 60 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Fermo

Macerata

Why visit Macerata

Macerata sits at 315 meters on a hilltop between the Chienti and Potenza valleys, thirty-five kilometers south of Ancona. The Roman Helvia Recina stood on the plain below; after the city was destroyed by the Goths the survivors moved up to the present site, where the town grew into the provincial capital.

The University, founded in 1290, is one of the oldest in continuous operation in Europe. The Sferisterio, the city's signature monument, is a 100-meter neoclassical arena designed by Ireneo Aleandri in 1823, originally built for pallone col bracciale, the bracelet-ball game once played across central Italy.

From 1921, when Verdi's Aida was first staged there, it became one of Italy's principal open-air opera venues. The Macerata Opera Festival runs through July and August.

The provincial museum holds works by Carlo Crivelli, Lorenzo Lotto and Antonio Canova. The 2016 earthquakes damaged outlying frazioni but the centro storico held.

Signore te ne ringrazi have been named by a guide.

What to see in Macerata

• Sferisterio. Neoclassical 100-meter open-air arena designed by Ireneo Aleandri in 1823, originally built for pallone col bracciale, now seat of the Macerata Opera Festival since 1921.
• Università di Macerata. Founded in 1290, one of the oldest continuously operating universities in Europe, with its main rectorate on Piazza della Libertà.
• Piazza della Libertà. Main square of the centro storico, holds the Loggia dei Mercanti, the Palazzo del Comune and the Torre dei Tempi with its astronomical clock.

How to get to Macerata

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Ancona is roughly 58 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Macerata

Ascoli Piceno

Why visit Ascoli Piceno

Ascoli Piceno sits at 154 meters at the confluence of the Tronto and the Castellano, the historic capital of the Piceni who held this part of the Marche before Rome. The town is built almost entirely from local travertine, which gives the centro storico its luminous pale surface and its mirror behavior under rain: Piazza del Popolo, paved in polished travertine slabs, is one of the most photographed squares in Italy.

In 91 BC the Ascolani killed the Roman delegation in their forum and triggered the Social War; the city was razed and rebuilt by Rome and the present grid still follows the Roman layout. The Quintana, run in costume in July and August, is a joust between the six sestieri, the city districts, the knight on horseback charging an effigy of an Arab warrior.

Anisetta Meletti, the local aniseed liqueur invented in 1907, is poured at the Caffè Meletti on the piazza.

Caffè Meletti, Tetsu have been named by a guide.

What to see in Ascoli Piceno

• Piazza del Popolo. Paved in polished travertine slabs and lined by Renaissance porticoes, the Palazzo dei Capitani and the Loggia dei Mercanti, one of the most photographed squares in Italy.
• Chiesa di San Francesco. Gothic basilica begun in the thirteenth century, three travertine portals, two bell-towers, the largest Marchigiana example of the Franciscan order's architecture.
• Cattedrale di Sant'Emidio. Cathedral on Piazza Arringo, with a fifth-century crypt holding the relics of Sant'Emidio, patron saint invoked against earthquakes.

How to get to Ascoli Piceno

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pescara is roughly 72 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Ascoli Piceno