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THE FOODS
In this gently hilly region between the Adriatic and the Apennines, cooks draw from sea and land and with enviable ease bring the best of both to the table. Fish prevails in the port of Ancona, whose brodetto calls for exactly 13 types in a spicy broth with garlic and tomato. The Adriatic provides the freshest of seafood, sardines, hake, bream, sole, red mullet, crustaceans and mollusks, but Ancona is also famous for a dish based on dried cod called stoccafisso or stocco all'anconetana.
The Marches fits central Italian stereotypes with its fine olive oil and pecorino, as well as unsalted bread. But it also feels the culinary influence of Emilia-Romagna with its fresh egg pasta and salumi. At Urbino, they vary Romagna's cheese-based passatelli by adding meat to the mixture. Macerata is the home of vincisgrassi, a legendary lasagne crowned, in season, with white truffles, which flourish in the Marches as nowhere else outside of Piedmont.
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THE WINES
Verdicchio is the plenipotentiary of the wines of this pleasant Adriatic region, whose long-time devotion to whites no longer obscures the increasing merits of its reds. The Castelli di Jesi DOC zone, covering a vast tract of hills west of the port of Ancona, is the home of the Verdicchio that made an early impression abroad in its green amphora bottles. But recently producers have created a new image of Verdicchio as a white wine of special character that comes across even more convincingly in standard bottles.
Class has risen so steadily that even wine still sold in the hourglass-shaped amphora seems a cut above the general level of popular whites. Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico, has been described as Italy's premier wine to serve with fish. Some producers make wines that develop such impressive depth and complexity with age that Verdicchio is increasingly ranked among the noblest native white varieties of Italy.
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