Sirolo

Sirolo sits, twenty kilometers from Ancona, on ground that belonged to the Conti Cortesi family. The medieval village kept one of the two original castle towers, folded now into the parish church, and the belvedere above Piazza Vittorio Veneto looks out across the bay. Below town, the ridge drops toward the Picene necropolis of I Pini, and further down still toward the water.

The mountain above the village and the water below it are the same geology: limestone that falls straight into the sea rather than tapering through a coastal plain, which is why the village sits on a clifftop rather than a shoreline. Upper Sirolo is the castle, the church and the theatre, all cut from the same pale stone. Lower Sirolo is reached by boat or by trail, down through the park to the cove where the sea stacks stand.

The grave goods from the necropolis have left town entirely, kept at the Antiquarium in neighbouring Numana, so what remains above ground here is the tomb site itself rather than its contents. The town doubles in summer and empties again in October: a place shaped less by what happens in it than by the drop between its two levels, the built one and the wild one.

From Ancona / Pescara (AOI), about 44 minutes by car.

Rimini (RMI) is about 1h 47m away.

By car from Ancona 31 minutes or Pescara 1h 50m.