For years, travel editors looking for a headline have reached for the same comparison. Le Marche: Italy's New Tuscany. The hills certainly invite it — rolling, golden, dotted with cypress trees and medieval towers. The food invites it too. So does the wine, the art, the sheer density of beautiful things per square kilometre.
But spend a week here and the comparison starts to feel insufficient. Le Marche isn't Tuscany with fewer tourists. It's something else entirely — and the difference is worth understanding before you arrive.
What the comparison gets right
Let's be fair to the travel writers. The parallels are real.
Like Tuscany, Le Marche is a place where the landscape itself feels composed. The hills between Fermo and Macerata look as though someone arranged them with a particular quality of afternoon light in mind. Medieval hilltop villages — Monteprandone, Amandola, Montefiore dell'Aso — sit on ridgelines as they have for eight hundred years, unchanged in silhouette if not in daily life.
The food culture is serious in that quintessentially Italian way: deeply local, seasonal without making a point of it, built around ingredients you can't quite replicate at home. Vincisgrassi, the region's magnificent answer to lasagne. Maccheroni al ragù the way nobody's grandmother makes it in Milan. Sheep's cheese from farms you could visit if you knew to ask.
And the wine. The Piceno area — which stretches from the hills around Fermo down toward Ascoli — produces Rosso Piceno and Offida Rosso that deserve far more international attention than they receive. Tenuta Cocci Grifoni, one of our neighbours here in Torre di Palme, has been making wines from Montepulciano d'Abruzzo and Pecorino grapes for decades. You can visit, taste, and leave with bottles you won't find in any shop.
So yes: rolling hills, excellent food, serious wine, medieval villages, Renaissance art. The Tuscany comparison makes sense.
What it misses
Here's what travel pieces rarely mention: Le Marche has the sea.
Not in the metaphorical, drive-two-hours sense of Tuscany. In the literal sense — from the hills around Torre di Palme, where we are, you can see the Adriatic from your terrace. You can be on the beach in ten minutes. In the hills in twenty. In a medieval village in five. This is not a choice between landscapes; it's access to all of them simultaneously.
The Adriatic coast here is also, frankly, underrated. The stretch from Civitanova Marche down through Porto San Giorgio to San Benedetto del Tronto is not the glamorous coast of the Amalfi or the Cinque Terre. It doesn't try to be. What it offers instead is a genuine Italian seaside culture — the kind where locals actually go, where the fish at lunch came out of the water that morning, where a beach umbrella and a sunbed costs a reasonable amount and nobody is performing for anyone.
And then there's the geography nobody photographs: the Sibillini Mountains, forty minutes inland. The Gola della Rossa. The Frasassi caves. Le Marche is a place of surprising depth, literally and otherwise.
The question of tourists — or the lack of them
Tuscany receives around 15 million visitors a year. Le Marche receives perhaps one million, concentrated largely in August along the coast. Outside that month, and outside those beach towns, you can walk into places — remarkable places, places that would be overrun in Tuscany — and find yourself essentially alone.
This has consequences. Restaurants that rely on regulars rather than foot traffic cook differently. Shopkeepers talk to you. The pace of things is recognisably Italian without being accelerated by tourist demand into a performance of itself.
Whether this will last is a fair question. The New Tuscany label, repeated often enough in the right publications, does eventually change the thing it describes. It happened to parts of Umbria. It could happen here.
For now, though, the timing is good.
What to do with this information
If you're planning a trip to Italy and have already done Florence, Siena, the Amalfi coast — Le Marche is the logical next chapter. It rewards the same instincts that drew you to those places: the desire for beauty, for food that means something, for a landscape that asks you to slow down.
What it doesn't share with those places is the infrastructure of mass tourism. There are no hop-on hop-off buses. The best restaurants don't have translated menus. You'll need a car, some patience with the unpredictable hours of rural Italy, and a willingness to eat whatever someone tells you is good today.
In exchange, you get the version of Italy that the travel pieces are always promising but rarely delivering: somewhere that doesn't feel like it's been arranged for your arrival. A place that is still, more or less, just itself.
We've spent time in Le Marche because we live here, not because we need reasons. If you want to experience it in a way that goes beyond hotels, our house in Torre di Palme — Gelsomoro — is a portion of a restored medieval borgo, two kilometres from the Adriatic, with a pool that faces the sea. A decent place to start.