Le Marche: Cartoceto, Fano...

Old Aug 31st, 2015, 04:39 PM
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Le Marche: Cartoceto, Fano...

Starting to think about finally visiting my grandparents' birthplaces: Saltara, Cartoceto and Fano. Urbino sounds like a great place to visit as well, and I am open to other towns, the Furlo Gorge, etc. Maybe spend a week or more in the area, staying at one or two hotels and/or agritoursimo.

1. Curious about how to get around. Is there any chance of using public transportation? I don't relish the idea of hassling with a car. Maybe I'd get centrally located in one or two places in the northern part of the region, and then take local transport. Or a cab? Any ideas would be helpful.

2. Besides the towns mentioned above, are there other places I should incorporate into an itinerary? And in what order?

Time of year to be determined, but not the heat of summer.

Thanks a bunch.
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Old Sep 1st, 2015, 03:06 AM
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I live very near this area, and know many of the towns around there. I've never been to Saltara, but I think I've been to Cartoceto. It's a very beautiful, but sparsely populated area.

I just did a little research, and it looks to me as though it would be possible to visit all of these towns without a car, but I think it would be very limiting. The bus services are designed for the convenience of high school students, who go to specialized schools in other towns. For that reason, they tend to go early in the morning from small towns to larger centers, and back again in the late afternoon. Otherwise, service is infrequent. Schools are open Saturdays, but often there's no service at all on Sundays. Also, for the same reason, service is much more frequent when school is in session. If you decide not to rent a car, try to go after mid-September or before mid-June.

There's bus service from Cartoceto to Fano, stopping in Saltara. The two towns are five minutes apart by bus (or by car). So it would be fairly easy to stay in one of the towns and visit the other. It would also be fairly easy to visit Fano, which is about 45 minutes away by bus from Cartoceto. Some of the buses are direct, while others require a change of bus in Borgaccio. (The buses wait for each other, so you don't have to worry about missing the connection, and the direct buses actually take a little longer to get there.) I think it would be better to stay in either Cartoceto or Saltara, given how the bus schedules work. The only problem is that many rural lodgings would be nowhere near a bus stop. You'd have to make sure about this when enquiring about lodging.

Visiting Urbino would be a bit more difficult, but not impossible. You'd take a bus to Fano and switch there to a bus to Urbino. The bus takes about an hour and

From Fano, you could visit other towns on the coast, and even inland, making use of the Adriatic train line. One of my favorite seaside towns is Senigallia.

Here is the Adriabus page that has the winter schedules from Cartoceto:

http://www.adriabus.eu/bo/UserFiles/...%202010/73.pdf

Here you can see the summer schedules from Fano to Urbino:

http://www.adriabus.eu/media/userfil...%202015(2).pdf

I don't understand why one is a summer schedule and the other a winter schedule. It's possible that Cartoceto and Saltara don't have summer service. In any case, "winter" usually means when school is in session. And service between Pesaro (and also Fano) and Urbino is less affected by school schedules that other lines, because Pesaro and Urbino are co-capitals of the region, and therefore service has to be rather efficient all year.

You have to check carefully all the column heads and footnotes on the bus schedules, to make sure that the bus you want really runs that day.

What you would be missing by using only public transportation is the opportunity to visit many of the other lovely towns in the area. You'd almost always have to go into Fano and back out to visit any other town, and visiting two in one day would be virtually impossible. Some of these towns have really nothing to do, other than gaze at the town walls and towers. It hardly seems worth a long journey to get to a tiny town that closes up tight from 12:30 to 4:30 and have to wait six hours for the next bus.

There is lovely countryside to drive through in the area. The Furlo gorge is very beautiful, but very poorly served by public transportation. In the area of Fratterosa, there are traditional potteries that make the very distinct type of pottery of this area.

Just as an example, another Fodor member thanked me yesterday for recommending a day trip to Mondavio and Corinaldo when she was staying in Urbino. Apparently it was a highlight of her trip. This is something easily done with a car, maybe passing through the Gola di Furlo on the way and stopping at a pottery on the way back. Without a car, you could visit one of these towns, but not the other, and it would hardly be worth the long trek to get there.

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...ice-sought.cfm
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Old Sep 1st, 2015, 04:00 AM
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For what it's worth, I once spent a week driving around le Marche -- which is beautiful -- and can remember at the time being really impressed with the quality of the engineering on the roads, and the high level of maintenance. Also, there is barely any other traffic, so one doesn't feel particularly stressed or pressured.

That said, even though i had some rainy weather and it was no problem at all, this is not an area I would want to be driving through very much off-season, and most certainly not in winter with any risk of snow or ice, because it is mountainous and twisty. I was not there in summer, so I don't know what kind of heat le Marche gets in July, but I would think that because of the elevation, the heat is moderated, and there is plenty of shade and breeze. I'm sure bvlienci can provide some depth here, but on the surface I would be tempted to go in summer.

I drove down from Bologna by way of Ravenna, but it would have been simple to take a train or plane to Ancona and pick up the car there had I wanted to minimize the driving. If you need an automatic transmission, you should be able to easily arrange for one in advance at Ancona airport.

Apart from Urbino and Ascoli Piceno (which is too far south for your basic itinerary), I did not spend a lot of time sightseeing the towns so I won't make any recommendations. However I will say that when I stopped in small towns at random for lunch, a coffee, services, a break -- they were all interesting in their own way, and many memorably charming, and filled with friendly people who are not blase about visitors (or fed up with hordes of them!), so it was a fun and relaxed tour. The food was absolutely delicious.
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Old Sep 1st, 2015, 08:56 AM
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Most of Le Marche isn't at a high enough elevation to totally escape the summer heat. However, it's not as hot as Rome, Florence, or Milan.

Snow and ice are not very much of a problem in much of Le Marche. In the southern part, in the Sibillines, ice and snow are much more common, and at higher elevations in the Apennines, there is often snow when it's downright balmy in the valleys. Urbino is at a somewhat higher elevation than where I live, so it sometimes snows when we have rain, but even there, it rarely lasts past the late morning. My favorite time to visit would be the spring; late May and early June are often lovely, but autumn is also usually very nice here. Rain can be frequent in both spring and autumn, but I think a little rain, unless you're hiking, has its charms. If you want to travel around by bus, you should definitely avoid the periods when school isn't in session. That would be, as I said, from sometime in mid-June to sometime in early to mid-September, and for a week after Christmas and a week sometime around Easter.

I used to say that we had excellent roads here, but unfortunately we've now had two successive years of intense spring rain, with severe flooding in places, and landslides in many hilly areas. As a result a lot of roads are no longer in great condition, and the provinces (responsible for most of the road maintenance outside of the towns) are pretty much out of funds to repair them. The places where the roads are in bad condition are well marked however, and in some places they've put in traffic lights so that cars can pass the bad spots one vehicle at a time. All in all, driving here is quite easy.

I've never used a car rental agency around here, for obvious reasons, but I know there are some across from the Ancona train station. I don't know if they'd have the selection available at the airport. The airport is small, and all the rental agencies use the same desk (and the same employee). I'm not sure you can be certain to be able to get a car with automatic transmission there.
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Old Sep 1st, 2015, 09:02 AM
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Old Sep 1st, 2015, 11:36 AM
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I was offered a car with an automatic transmission for pick up at the Ancona airport, so it is doable. But if an automatic is needed, you need to work it out in advance wherever you go in Italy, and follow up.

Coming from Liguria, it is hard to find a set of roads in worse shape or more crazily built in the first place, so perhaps I am easily impressed. But still -- compared with Puglia, Lazio, Campania & Sicily -- one hopes Le Marche won't soon be joinng that low level of road maintenance.
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Old Sep 2nd, 2015, 09:43 AM
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Thank you all for your suggestions. A car sounds like the best way to approach the trip. And since I am used to a manual transmission I should be OK.
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Old Sep 2nd, 2015, 03:03 PM
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Also check out jamikins postings… has done several reports on Le Marche

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...-le-marche.cfm
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