Abruzzo or Le Marche
 

Hello everyone,

We wife and I will be in Rome on business for a few days in early July and we would like to spend a week exploring the region of either Abruzzo or Le Marche. We want to visit beautiful medieval villages, spend time at glorious beaches and simply have a wonderful Italian experience.

Which would you choose and why?

Thanks so much.

Michael

We havent yet been to Abruzzo but absolutely LOVE Le Marche, in fact we plan to move there some day. We have spent about 5 weeks over 3 years there.

We love the scenery, the people, the food, the affordability and the lack of English speaking tourists.

You can see our pics here:
https://flickr.com/photos/[email protected]

And our trip reports here:
http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...t-do-italy.cfm

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...rche-lucca.cfm

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...-dolomites.cfm

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

Happy Planning!

Are you prepared to hire a car or do you want to do the whole of the trip using trains, buses etc?

What hotel class?

Thanks for both of your replies.

Great links, jamikins. They will be very useful and we will review them over the next few days.

Nochblad, we will be renting a car in Rome and we usually stay in 3 or 4 star hotels during our travels.

Thanks.

I live in Le Marche, near a very nice beach (Senigallia). I'm not much of a beach person, so we just go there and haven't spent much time looking for better. Some marchigiano beaches that I know and can suggest are Senigallia (wide, sandy); the towns of the Riviera del Conero (Portonovo, Sirolo, and Numana) which have Mount Conero as a backdrop, and are often pebbly rather than sandy; Porto San Giorgio, which I don't know well, but where friends of ours have a summer house.

San Benedetto is very well-known for its palm-lined promenade, but the town itself doesn't impress me.

Torre di Palme is a pretty walled town on a cliff overlooking the sea; as such it has no beach, but is near Porto San Giorgio.

I found this site (in Italian) that describes the "ten best" beaches in Abruzzo. Most I hadn't heard of, except Pineto, but they sound nice. You can paste the URL into translate.google.com to get a decent translation.

For charming hill towns, you can't beat Le Marche. The hill towns I've seen in Abruzzo are more like diamonds in the rough. The inland parts of Abruzzo are very sparsely populated.