Ancona

Ancona bends like an elbow around one of the Adriatic’s great natural harbours, a hill city of Greek, Roman, medieval and papal layers crowned by a cathedral on the water’s edge. Capital of the Marche, it pairs working-port energy with Roman marbles, a pentagonal eighteenth-century lazaretto and beaches at the city’s back door.

Why visit

Travellers who board ferries in Ancona often leave without knowing what they passed. The city deserves better: it is a place where you can stand under a white marble Roman triumphal arch, climb to a romanesque cathedral whose dome watches over the harbour, and then walk to a seventeenth-century church on a beach south of town — all within a day. Ancona’s setting is its argument: a city of hills run down to the sea on a promontory that shelters one of the finest natural ports of the Adriatic, unique in Italy for letting you watch both sunrise and sunset over the water. The centre is dense and walkable, threaded with itineraries the municipality maintains — Ancona through the centuries, Jewish Ancona, underground Ancona — and the coast at Passetto and Portonovo supplies rocky coves and pebble beaches minutes from the piazze. For visitors bound for the Conero riviera or Greece, this is the natural stopover; for anyone interested in ports as engines of history, it is a destination in its own right.

Character and history

The Greeks gave Ancona its shape and its name: settlers from Syracuse arrived around 387 BC, calling the place Ankon — elbow — for the hooked promontory that shelters the harbour, and the “Doric city” still mints civic pride from that lineage. Rome enlarged the port under Trajan with his engineer Apollodorus of Damascus, and the Senate’s marble arch of 115, rising about eighteen metres at the harbour mouth, appears carved on Trajan’s Column in Rome. After Byzantine times and Saracen raids, the city grew into an independent maritime republic that struck its own agontano coinage and beat off imperial sieges — the siege of 1174 is remembered through the heroine Stamira — before falling to the Papal States in 1532. Papal Ancona boomed as a free port under Clement XII: the lazaretto built between 1733 and 1743 by Luigi Vanvitelli on an artificial island in the harbour is the monument to that era. The city’s Jewish community, tolerated here when expelled elsewhere, gave it one of Italy’s enduring historic quarters. Bombarded in 1915 and taken by the Polish 2nd Corps in July 1944, Ancona rebuilt into the Adriatic’s ferry gateway — pragmatic, layered, unsentimental.

What to see

Start high at the Ancona Cathedral (San Ciriaco) on Colle Guasco, a grey-stone romanesque church on a Greek-cross plan, consecrated in the early eleventh century and completed in 1189, with a dodecagonal dome and ten columns said to come from a Roman temple. Below the hill lie the Roman Amphitheatre of Ancona, Augustan in date and overlooking the ancient city, and the Arch of Trajan at the harbour’s south mole.

The waterfront’s centrepiece is the Mole Vanvitelliana (Lazzaretto of Ancona), Vanvitelli’s pentagonal quarantine island with a temple of San Rocco at its heart — now a venue for exhibitions, concerts and cinema, and home since 1993 to the Omero State Tactile Museum, where art is read by hand.

In the historic centre, visit the Church of Santa Maria della Piazza with its Romanesque facade, the Loggia dei Mercanti, the Piazza del Plebiscito with Cornacchini’s statue of Clement XII, the Francesco Podesti Civic Art Gallery, the National Archaeological Museum of the Marches in Palazzo Ferretti, the baroque double-faced Porta Pia, the Teatro delle Muse and the Ancona Citadel. South along the coast stands the eleventh-century Church of Santa Maria di Portonovo, and on the Passetto rocks the Passetto War Memorial faces the open sea.

How to experience

Climb to San Ciriaco late in the afternoon, when the harbour glitters and the dome’s profile does its best work, then descend through the lanes of the old centre to the seafront. Take a guided visit of the amphitheatre when the municipality’s seasonal openings run, and give the Mole Vanvitelliana an unhurried hour — its geometry is best read from the bridges, its Omero museum is unlike any other in Italy, and its summer programme often earns an evening return. Use the city as a base for the coast: swim below the Passetto cliffs, then continue to Portonovo for the church, the bay and a seafood lunch on the water. The municipality’s themed itineraries — Grand Tour Vanvitelliano, Jewish Ancona, the twentieth-century trail — are free frameworks that impose order on a layered centre. Time a visit around the September Festival della Storia or Festa del Mare if you can.

Practical planning

Ancona is the capital of the Marche, on the Adriatic about 280 km northeast of Rome, with its own airport at Falconara, a main railway station on the Bologna–Lecce line, and the Adriatic’s principal ferry port for Greece and Croatia. The historic centre sits between the port and the hills — steep in places, so plan routes around the Guasco climb. City buses reach the Passetto and Portonovo in season; the Conero coast is a short drive south. Museums and monuments keep mixed weekly schedules, and the amphitheatre opens for guided visits only — check anconatourism.it and comuneancona.it before travelling. Late spring and September suit walkers best; July and August bring beach crowds to Portonovo and Mezzavalle. Non-slip shoes serve well on the Passetto rocks.

Nearby places

South along the Conero coast lie Numana and Sirolo, the Riviera’s twin seaside towns gathered under the Conero Riviera banner. Inland and north in the same province are the medieval centres of Jesi, Corinaldo and Senigallia, with Loreto, Italy’s great Marian shrine, just up the valley.