The first morning rays of the brilliant summer sun streamed into our room through the open window. A new day had just started. And it was our mission to render it a great one.
We spent a relaxed morning at home with Luca, drinking coffee and listening to some exquisite Italian music.
Now it’s almost noon and we’ve hit the road. It has been a very pleasant ride driving up and down the covered with vineyards and various other crops smoothly undulating hills; and passing through the picturesque, old villages. In one of them, we stopped to get something for lunch at a bakery. It was surprisingly pleasant that its affable owner, after we bought six slices of pizza, gave us another four slices plus four croissants for free.
Now the time is twenty minutes before noon. The heat is at the peak of its inexorability. We are approaching back to Ancona and are heading straight to the sea.
Some few kilometers south of Ancona, that 572 meters tall mountain known as Monte Conero is situated overlooking the blue waters of the Adriatic Sea. We drove the road along the scenic Mezzavalle Beach and ended up in Portonovo by the north foot of the mountain. There was a succession of some short, narrow beaches around the promontory following Mezzavalle Beach. To one of them, we ended up.
There was that guy settling there in a big caravan who was renting out canoes. It was 10 euro per hour – which was quite insane – but the coastline to the south obviously deserved some exploration. So we got two canoes, threw them in the sea, and started paddling southwards along the coast.
The beauty of the environs was epic: the whitish, rocky precipices of Monte Conero plunging vertically into the sea; the narrow, covered with white pebbles beaches succeeding one another; some lonely, sharp rock formations towering boldly out of the sea here and there; and some long-abandoned, of an unknown to me usage, old constructions.
We paddled quite some distance along the haughty mountain and ended up at the beach of two sisters (spaggia di due sorelle), named so in honor of the two adjoining, sharp rocks protruding out of the waves in close distance off the shore. We lunched, we swam, and we enjoyed the peacefulness of the place for about an hour. We could, indeed, have done that for much longer, but it wouldn’t be a wise idea, taking into consideration we’d need to pay 10 euro to the canoe guy for every hour.
About two hours later, we had delivered back the canoes and had driven back to Luca’s place. We spent the afternoon there making the preparations for departing the next day: washing clothes, packing, and fixing the derailleur of Christina’s bike which was quite a mess.
Later in the evening, Zhenni came back from work, one more friend of Luca’s came to visit too, and we enjoyed yet another delicious Italian dinner Luca made for us. After dinner, we all together drove to the neighboring Morro d’ Alba village where a wine festival was taking place. There was an enchanting atmosphere pervading the place: with the strong moonlight illuminating the village’s old castle. There were quite many people attending the festival: tasting the various wines that were to be tasted and chatting merrily all around. It was a nice event where one could spend easily the whole night until dawn. But, in our case, we had to leave it by midnight. As we should be up and ready to get going towards new places by dawn time the day after.
Accommodation and Activities in Italy
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