The Dolce Vita Diaries. Cathy Rogers
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was our first trip to Le Marche. We’d never heard of the place before and still hesitated to say the name aloud. It sounded so foreign in our mouths. It was hard to believe that the ‘ch’ wasn’t pronounced as it is in ‘church’. Also, that ‘Le’ looked a bit more French than Italian to our unseasoned eye. So we felt we were making a mistake if we said it right, or we’d go the whole wrong hog and pronounce the region ‘Les Marchais’, which made it sound like a French triumphal march.
Most people still haven’t heard of Le Marche. If they have, it’s probably because they have seen an article in a Sunday paper entitled something like ‘Is Le Marche the New Tuscany?’ A question which only serves to underline the fact that it isn’t.
We were there because, in the course of conversation with old family friends Noddy and Graham, we’d mentioned our ‘new life’ plans as a sort of distant hypothetical project. But as a first step, we’d said, we were keen to explore a bit of Italy, starting from the imminent bank holiday weekend. Graham mentioned this place called ‘Le Marche’. I think he probably pronounced it lemarshay. He’d spent a lot of time in Croatia, which is just a nip across the Adriatic from the Italian swampy marshland, and he’d heard it was fabulous—‘like Tuscany but more of a secret’. He’d even acquired some little booklets about it. The booklets were full of photos of olive groves and vines and overcolourized photos of plates of food, like a 1970s cookbook. The text was really badly translated from the Italian. All of these facts we took as an excellent sign that it was indeed, unlike Tuscany, charmingly un-up-with-the-times.
Le Marche hadn’t exactly featured heavily in Jason’s olive oil research, but nonetheless the next day we booked some flights with Ryanair to a place called Ancona, which the ever-informative and ever-growing airline flight map assured us was the capital of this Le Marche. I think at the time they had four or five flights a week, all from London’s glistening Stansted Airport.
So it was that we came to be in Le Marche. Which for the record is pronounced ‘ley’ (like the end of ballet) ‘markay’.
When you arrive, the airport is just as you’d hope. One small runway and a cramped single-storey building by way of arrivals, departures, customs, airport shopping, all rolled into one. The look of it, in dusty sunshine, brought to mind one of those impermanent outpost airports constructed quickly for an unworthy war. When the flight disembarked, the one building became full to bursting for a few minutes, only to be returned to sleepy silence within an hour. We knew this because the only car rental place, despite being in an airport where the one daily international flight arrived at 1 p.m., was closed for lunch.
The good thing about being on holiday is that it doesn’t matter. We sat in the sunshine and had a delicious tiny coffee and a panino and, before we knew it, there was a smiley man with a tiny dog on his lap at the Hertz reservation desk.
Our little car took us north. We’d decided to follow our noses on this trip. Important as it was that Le Marche cut it on the olive-growing front, and that it produced good olive oil, we also wanted to make sure that we actually liked it. Against instinct, we were trying to approach the trip less as TV producers on a rigorous recce and rather as young hopefuls ready for some romance.
We both love the feeling of seaside places out of season and we spent a few hours kicking sand around in a place called Cattolica. We contemplated swimming but it was just a bit too nippy. We did find one gelateria unseasonaly open and couldn’t let the opportunity go to waste. I had half chocolate and half hazelnut and, upon one lick along the border separating them, was rushed straight to heaven.
Why is ice cream so much nicer in Italy? I mean, isn’t it just milk and then stuff that you can get anywhere like nuts and chocolate? Is it, like the coffee, something to do with having fancy machines that just do the job better? Or is there something they’re hiding? Because you go into one of those awful British or American places and the ice cream is just horrid by comparison—vulgar, crude, not even tasting of what it’s meant to. The Italians aren’t averse to the odd horrid flavour—a bright blue one named after the Smurfs that tastes of nothing on earth, at least nothing this side of Belgium—but at least it seems they’re choosing to do it, rather than doing it because they don’t know better.
Italian ice cream tastes so good it almost manages to convince you that it’s good for you. So, healthily nourished, we headed inland to the pretty little town of Urbino. Up winding roads and through unlikely positioned hilltop villages, access hasn’t been made easy and that’s partly why it still feels secret. But once you’re there, you vow to come again. It is like a miniaturized version of the Tuscan big boys—the Sienas and the Florences. Cobbled streets and spectacular cathedrals and art palaces all positioned in a setting that could be taken straight from the backdrop of a Renaissance portrait. Bar a few telephone lines, the landscape looks unchanged for half a millennium.
We struck lucky with a hostel to stay in—on a steep cobbled hill, a couple of doors away from the house where Raphael was born—it was cheap as chips and right in the middle of town. We got rid of our stuff and went wandering around, a cardiac exercise in itself given that no part of the town is on the flat. Everything seemed to be small—there was a tiny carwash for tiny Italian cars, a tiny petrol pump, it was hard to keep the word ‘cute’ from your mind. Then, within minutes, the whole town was suddenly awash with luminously dressed cyclists careering around every corner and we kept being offered free Red Bull by passing strangers with funny Red Bull hats on. Yes, it was the day of the Red Bull sponsored cycling race around town and we had arrived in time for the start of festivities, which it transpired would go on all night in the form of Euro rock in the main square.
So this was Le Marche, ancient and modern. And we decided we liked it. That night, our fate was sealed when we tried our first Le Marche olive oil, a delicate oil from a place called Pesaro, on a delicious plate of orecchiette which was simplicity itself. A glass of Verdicchio was the final piece in the puzzle. Le Marche it would be.
A few months later, we were en route to Le Marche for the second time, via London. It was one of those traditional Ryanair journeys which begins at an hour of the day that should really be called night. At 4.30-something you ask yourself whether it is really worth it and at 11 a.m. in Italy you answer yourself ‘yes’.
This trip had a different feel about it. It was more than just a holiday, filled with pleasant but aimless wanderings. It was greater than a vague sniffing out of an area. Things had moved on and somehow, without either of us really spelling it out, we knew we weren’t just dipping our toes any more. This trip was the first real step towards our new life.
Our plan was to find a house in an olive-friendly area, then find a nearby olive grove to buy afterwards. Secretly, I think we both had hopes of stumbling across a beautiful house positioned in the middle of a huge olive grove, but we knew that was a long shot.
We’d lined up an array of estate agents for the trip. Le Marche covers a pretty big area so we planned to hop from one part to another with a different ‘tour guide’ for each, hoping that way we’d learn more about how house buying works as well as getting to know the region.
Pretty much all of Le Marche is hilly—the views forming that curvaceousness that is the hallmark of the Italian countryside and that spawns fresh lovers every day. All of these deeply tilting hills are divvied up by the lines made by olive trees, often used as a marker of the border of one farm to the next. It all looked just like the romantic vision we all secretly nurture of a new life abroad.
First up on the estate agent front was a duo: Sandro, a suave Italian in an Audi, and his scatty German assistant, Valeria. We’d told them our plan about the olive grove so occasionally Valeria would excitedly say something like ‘This house has fifteen olive trees in the garden’, which only served to confirm that we’d never find house and grove together. The important thing, instead, was to make sure the area was suitable—which ruled out places too high (olive trees don’t like frost), places too near the coast, where the trees don’t tend to thrive, or any shady oak-filled valleys (obviously they need loads of sun).
Most of the houses we were shown ‘needed work’. That’s what the English buyer wants, we were told. But we weren’t sure we wanted