We are on the road again, leaving Rustico after three days of magic. We have been in Marche, (Mar'-kay) a region of Italy from somewhere in the middle to the East Coast across from Tuscany. We had driven here on the superstrada, stayed 2 strange days with Maddelina in Ostra and then drove an hour to our final hosts Giacomo and Marguerita. They put us up in the country house of her parents, as they live in a small apartment in Osimo. We were their first Servas vistors and maybe they were showing off a little bit, but they gave us a beautiful newly renovated house, complete with hot water on demand, a washing machine, 2 goats and a yard full of chickens, and a park next door with an amazing zipline–swing combination where Ezra rediscovered himself as a champion zipper every morning and afternoon.
Our hosts have Emma, who is Itzel's age and has just figured out how fun it is to bop other kids on the head with objects, and Leo who is just 12 weeks old and has begun smiling. On our first night we arrived to a parking lot in Osimo, where our hosts spied through their apartment window and met us. We then followed them from the city (here anything that is not countryside is so densely packed that even a town of 12,000 feels like a city for the minute it takes to pass through, though I think Osimo is bigger) for a 10-minute drive out to the country. They left us at the house to relax and unpack with plans to meet for dinner. They brought pizza and gelato, which was the first time we'd had either to-go and both were delicious.
The following day, they took us to see an inspiring Adriatic coastline abutting a mountain with white rocky beaches and blue-green water almost Caribbean-looking. In the evening, Marguerita made a several course dinner and invited an old schoolmate, his Polish wife and their 8-week-old baby for dinner – garlic and tomato crostinis, tortellini with peas and bacon, whole zucchinis stuffed with meaty filling, and a giant homemade tiramisu. We had local wine and talked about how the visiting couple live in a village of 12 in the Italian Alps, and how when their baby was born it was the first in the village for 55 years.
Our next day was a very exciting and important trip to Fano, a town of 62,000 where my best friend's family on her Dad's side is originally from. Fano is on the coast an hour North of where we were staying and doesn't even get a mention in our Italy guidebook. We expected it to be semi-industrial and maybe a little roughneck, since no one talks about visiting there. We found instead a busy and thriving little city which inside the old walls was charming, full of cool shops and a big weekly outdoor market in the middle of the main square. More chic than most American towns of its size, Fano offers great shopping, boasts a Benetton, Max Mara and lots of other hipster shops, some international and some independent, alongside cheese shops, Internet cafes and pasticcerias, and a refreshing lack of tourists. We took a million pictures and collected some special treasures to give to Olivia.
We drove next to Urbino, a much smaller and heavily-touristed walled city high on a mountain, with some important sites that we did not see. The whole town is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and so you have to pay to park. We had macchiatos, pastry and gelato, bought some little things and headed back to meet our hosts for dinner at a restaurant, which was big, brightly-lit and full of locals and a waiter who seemed to be in charge of serving the entire place. We slept well, except me since I am now dreaming in Italian of invaders trying to break into my walled castle, said goodbye to the goats, chickens, zipline and our hosts and left Rustico.
Today we are driving back towards Tuscany, through the countryside of Umbria to Assisi where we have a hotel in the center of the old town. In fact we are driving now and I should be looking out at the views, which are the most amazing yet, instead of making myself carsick, typing this on hairpin turns.
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