When people dream about the Italian countryside, they usually dream about Tuscany. Rolling hills. Stone houses. Vineyards. Tiny villages. Long dinners outside. And don’t get me wrong — Tuscany is beautiful.
But what if I told you there’s another region where you can have all of that, with fewer crowds and considerably fewer people trying to recreate Under the Tuscan Sun?
Welcome to the Marche.
This trip was never supposed to be an adventure.
My partner and I wanted something much simpler: a few days away together, somewhere beautiful, quiet and — most importantly — requiring very little effort from either of us. No packed itinerary. No alarms. No pressure to make the most of every single hour.
Just the two of us, a country house hidden among the hills, a swimming pool and the vague possibility of exploring somewhere nearby if we happened to feel particularly energetic.
Romance, apparently, looks different in your thirties.
And honestly? I’m completely fine with that. What we found was exactly the escape we had been looking for — and a part of Italy I hadn’t expected to fall for quite so much.
This wasn’t a sightseeing holiday
Let’s establish something immediately. We did not go to the Marche with an ambitious itinerary. There were no 7 a.m. alarms. No colour-coded list of attractions. No desperate attempt to visit six towns before dinner.
Quite the opposite.
The whole point of this little escape was to slow down and spend some proper time together. We had a country house surrounded by hills, a swimming pool outside and absolutely nowhere we needed to be.
That was already a fairly convincing argument for doing nothing. And for once, we listened. Our days developed their own very demanding routine.
- 🥐 Breakfast.
- 💦 Pool.
- 🏔️ Maybe a little trip somewhere.
- 🗺️ Back to the countryside.
- 🍝 Dinner.
- 🍷 Wine.
- 🔄 Repeat.
Some days we explored a medieval town. Some days our greatest achievement was deciding where to have dinner. Both felt equally successful. And somewhere between the hills, the food, the long afternoons by the pool and having nowhere particularly urgent to be, I realised that this was exactly the kind of holiday I needed.
Not every trip needs to be an adventure.
Sometimes disappearing into the Italian countryside with your favourite person for a few days is more than enough.
There was something wonderfully simple about those evenings. Coming back to the house after a little trip, showering, getting ready for dinner and driving through the hills with no real plans beyond finding somewhere good to eat.
No reservations made weeks in advance. No attraction we were already late for. No feeling that we should have squeezed something else into the day.
Just the two of us deciding what we felt like doing next. It sounds almost ridiculously ordinary. Maybe that’s why I remember it so fondly.
Maybe this is what a romantic getaway actually looks like
I think we sometimes have a strangely cinematic idea of romantic travel. Beautiful hotels. Candlelit dinners. Perfect sunsets. Carefully planned surprises.
And those things are lovely.
But this trip reminded me that sometimes romance is much less complicated than that.
It’s having nowhere to rush to. It’s spending an afternoon by the pool because neither of you feels like moving. It’s driving through the countryside looking for somewhere to have dinner. It’s having enough time together that you stop thinking about what you should be doing next.
Maybe the most romantic thing about this trip wasn’t where we went at all.
Maybe it was simply having time.
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