Ancona Discovery Guide

Ancona is a port city of about a hundred thousand people and the capital of the Marche. It sits on the only real natural harbour on Italy's Adriatic coast, on a promontory bent like an elbow, which is exactly what its Greek name means.

The friction is that it is a working port and looks like one. Cranes, lorry queues, ferry terminals and postwar blocks are the first thing you see, and the war took a great deal of what stood before them.

Behind that is a city almost nobody bothers with. A Roman arch of AD 115 still stands on the quay; a Romanesque cathedral sits on a Greek temple site on the hill above; and ten minutes south the Conero headland drops five hundred metres into the clearest water on this coast. Ancona is where Italy faces east, and it has been doing it for two and a half thousand years.

Walk out to the arch

Through the port gates, along the quay, with ferries loading beside you. A Roman monument in the middle of a container terminal is the whole city in one image.

Climb to San Ciriaco

Up the Guasco hill at the end of the afternoon, for the church and for the view down onto the harbour.

Eat brodetto

In a trattoria near the port, at lunch, and do not order anything else.

Spend an afternoon in the Mole

Vanvitelli's quarantine island, free to walk into, usually with something on inside.

Go down to the Passetto

The steps, the cliff, the boat caves cut into the rock, and the way the city uses its own shoreline.

Take the bus to Portonovo

Twenty minutes for a pebble bay under the Conero cliffs, with an eleventh-century abbey church standing on the beach.

Ancona is the least touristed regional capital in central Italy and is entirely at ease with that.

It is a port, a university city and an administrative centre, and its economy has nothing to do with visitors. People are direct, unhurried and helpful without ceremony; nobody is performing an idea of Italy for you here.

The city carries visible damage. Bombing, an earthquake and a landslide within forty years hollowed out parts of the centre, and there are streets that have never recovered. Anconetani are frank about this and quite funny about it.

There is a strong maritime and left-wing tradition — dockers, anarchists, a long memory of Red Week — and it still shapes local politics.

The Balkans are close and present. Croatian and Albanian are ordinary sounds on the quay, and a good part of the city's trade and family ties run across the water rather than down the peninsula.

In summer everyone decamps to the Conero, and the city goes quiet in a way that visitors often mistake for emptiness.

The pressure here is not on the city. It is on ten kilometres of coast immediately south of it.

The Conero beaches — Portonovo, the Due Sorelle, the Sassi Neri — are inside a regional park and are small, cliff-backed and easily overwhelmed. In July and August access to Portonovo is restricted and paid for exactly this reason; use the shuttle rather than trying to drive in.

Do not land on or camp at the Due Sorelle. It is reached by boat and the pressure on it is already at the limit.

Stay in the city. Ancona has beds, restaurants and an economy that would benefit, and it is twenty minutes from the coast that does not.

Buy fish that was landed here, in season, from the market or a restaurant that will tell you what came in.

On the unstable slopes above the northern city, stay off closed ground; it is fenced because it moves.

Treat the port as a workplace: it is not a viewpoint, and the lorry lanes are dangerous on foot.

September is the best single month: warm sea, empty Conero beaches, and the summer crowds gone.

May and June are green and clear, with everything open and the water still cold.

July and August are hot, humid and busy on the coast; the city itself empties as residents go to the beaches, and the port runs at full capacity with holiday ferry traffic.

Early May brings the patronal feast of San Ciriaco and the fair that goes with it.

Winter is mild, wet and windy, the museums are yours, and the fish is at its best.

If you are taking a ferry, note that sailings to Greece and Croatia thin out considerably between November and April.

What a visitor actually pays in Ancona

Ancona itself is inexpensive, because it is a working city rather than a destination and its hotel stock is aimed at ferry passengers and business travellers. The Conero coast is a different market entirely and charges resort prices for eight weeks of the year. The sensible arrangement is to sleep in the city and drive or take the bus to the beaches.