Ancona Culture

Ancona is a working city and behaves like one; the courtesy here is practical rather than decorative.

A port identity

People arrive and leave constantly — Greek and Albanian lorry drivers, Croatian holidaymakers, students, seafarers — and the city has been absorbing that traffic for two and a half thousand years. It is more mixed and less inward than most Italian cities of its size, and considerably less interested in impressing you.

Fish

Brodetto anconetano, the local fish stew, is traditionally made with thirteen kinds of fish and no two cooks agree on which. Stockfish cooked the Ancona way, with potatoes and tomato, is the other dish the city defends.

Anarchists and dockers

Ancona has a long radical history: it was a centre of Italian anarchism, Errico Malatesta lived and organised here, and the insurrection known as Red Week began in the city in June 1914. Port towns tend to remember this kind of thing.

Wine

The hills immediately behind the Conero produce Rosso Conero, a dark red grown on the slopes above the sea, and the white Verdicchio comes from the Esino valley inland.

Dialect and distance

Anconetano is closer to the dialects of the Romagna than to those of the southern Marche, and the city has always been slightly apart from its own region: the hill towns inland regard it as noisy and modern, and it regards them as slow. Both positions have some merit.

The Muse

The city's opera house, restored after decades as a bombed shell, is the centre of the cultural year.