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MARCHE REGION
| Le Marche is an eternally fertile ear of corn sprouting from the ice, a battle of long-smouldering fires, a handful of wild ungathered flowers, an endlessly trampled sea wave. |
There is an unusual and ferocious force in the dusty roots of the Marche, in the land of stones and in the land of sea, in gardens of oak and olive trees and in gardens of waves and foam, in meadows of fragile plants and in meadows of water. Marche is a gesture of profound loyalty to the land, a gesture of belonging to its harsh and tormenting matrix. To love Marche one must embrace the sense of loss, fog and abyss, the desolated solitude and laboured splendour, its suffered surrender, bitterness and failure. To descend into this land one must sink into the suffering heart of a protracted cloistered life, in the frenzy of a luminous cell, in the secrecy of guarded and dreaded clandestinity: one must love the golden dustiness of the air and quench one’s thirst from obscurity, trace the powerful song smothering it in familiar silence. |
It is a matter of fact: Italy possesses the most remarkable artistic and cultural heritage in the world. And this is not all: its heritage is not just to be found in the great artistic cities, but is diffuse, "spread" throughout national territory as in no other country. The proof? Le Marche. A region in which a rich and varied countryside (the Adriatic sea, with its flat and sandy coast interrupted at intervals by rugged, rocky precipices; the harmonious agricultural landscape of its gentle hills; the deep and mysterious caves; the protected areas of natural beauty) is enriched with towns, villages, palaces, and religious buildings, all of them of important architectural and artistic value. This is the case with the cathedral of Ancona, the regional capital and an important Adriatic port, or the cathedral of Pesaro. In Urbino, the Ducal Palace is a stupefying testimony of Renaissance grandeur. If you find yourself in Macerata during the summer it is an unpardonable not to book a seat at the majestic Sferisterio theatre for a play or musical performance. At Ascoli Piceno the blend of medieval and renaissance architecture (S. Francesco, Loggia dei Mercanti, Piazza del Popolo, etc.) arrests the attention of even the most distracted visitor. But in almost all the centres of Le Marche, even the smallest, there are many genuine artistic treasures. It is difficult to single out one without doing the others an injustice. We will make an exception for Recanati, the birthplace of the most beloved Italian poet of all time: the tender, bitter, unhappy and sublime Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). It is difficult not to feel moved when visiting the building where the poet spent his childhood and adolescence. An emotion which is felt, in a rather different way, by the visitor to the Santa Casa at Loreto, the destination for continuous crowds of pilgrims. |
It is for all this that the Marche appears to be heroic and sublime, idyllic and restless, mystic and disturbing, seraphic and sparkling, weak and terrible. The myth of this region has something that is tenderly brutal, perched as it is on the very substance of existence, where people and things, serenely scattered, suffer the suture of the limen, a wound that tears them from the proportion of the landscape, turning them into boundary and island, distancing and separating them from the body of Italy, a spiritual and terrestrial border where one walks to somewhere else, a forgotten brink towards the infinite universe. And yet, in those furrows of rural tilled lands, in the land battered by the winds, in the scrap of sea “ploughed by fish” flows a tame and wild nature, as compelling as primordial instincts, like the ethereal and untouchable Gods. Marche is a place of peace and secret struggle, inspiration and tumult. A Land of vigorous passions. |
Websolute