Those who live in Marche Region know very well those feelings of serenity and lightness that pervade the many streets and alleys that intersect this beautiful region. The road, like a soft wave, unwinds in an ups and downs of colorful scenarios, each inspiring as many postcards, one more beautiful than the other. Each curve discovers a new landscape, in geometry, shapes and colors, like a colorful patchwork blanket lying to cover the limbs of a docile giant who moves slightly in his sleep.
As a child I waited with trepidation for the arrival of the "warm" season: spring. My mother would load my sister and me into the car and take us to visit our grandmother in her country house in San Rustico in Monte San Giusto; it started from the still humid slopes of San Ginesio, on the edge of the Sibillini Mountains, and crossed the countryside passing through the medieval villages of Loro Piceno, Mogliano and down until reaching a depression. It is here that a crossroads of houses creates a fundamental road junction for that peasant community that measures its wealth in the possession of tractors and monumental machines for harvesting and processing wheat and hay. It is no coincidence that the name of that place is Macinae there, still strategically placed at the crossroads, there is an oven, where I remember it was a must to stop to buy bread just as it once was, the fragrant Freshly baked husbands and the typical biscuits to be dipped in breakfast milk. The car was thus filled with that characteristic festive scent that made the rest of the journey electrifying for us children. From Macina you then went up again for a few kilometers and then took a narrow gravel road to the right, which wound quickly and quietly between fields of wheat and beets. Even today I gladly walk those streets and I try to remember that wonder that filled my eyes when they looked eagerly from the window at what was passing fast in front of them, careful not to lose any detail. Of course, today things have changed and as they say "there are no more half seasons" but in the Marche the beauty is still there, intact and perhaps more aware.
Our rolling hills, all cultivated, look like so many patches of land wonderfully wedged together so that not even a small piece remains unproductive. An excellent agricultural biodiversity, which our farmers, united with the land for generations, proudly preserve, handing down their millenary knowledge from father to son with dedication, love but also stubbornness, aware that without their hard commitment many fabulous products would be lost for always, such as the Fratte Rosa bean, the Cenerino bean, the cicerchia from Serra De 'Conti, the Montelupone artichoke, the Serbo tomato, the Suasa onion, the Naked barley, the Jervicella wheat etc. Our ancient wheats and stone-ground flours, our varieties of olives and our Evo oils. What about the wines: Verdicchio, Passerina, Pecorino, Lacrima di Morro d'Alba and Vernaccia just to name a few , the world has just discovered them and has not already fallen in love with them. Then our fruit: apples, plums, peaches, cherries and apricots, our cheeses and our cured meats ... it would take pages and pages list them all. Marche can offer many and many products generated by the land of our hills and by the commitment of our people who firmly believe in what they, Once a year each town or small village dresses up, naming a festival for it's own excellence, in a triumph of dishes with many characteristic names and on the occasion of proud and faithful re-enactments of their medieval history.
How can you not love Marche Region, as round as its hills, as sweet as the air that comes from the sea and as real as the people who live there.
Mariella Vico
