We were invited to stay overnight in the little pied-à-terre of cousin M. and her husband L. in the nearby beach resort town of Senigallia (a little less than 25 minutes from their home on the outskirts of Corinaldo, my great grandfather's hometown). We had a great view of the beach from the balcony:
The vibe of the beachfront area is not unlike that of Avalon, NJ, for example, with its quaint little shops and trendy-ish restaurants. The beaches along the Adriatic coast - at least the ones we've passed on our travels - seem to be narrower than most of those along the South Jersey shore. I imagine it gets pretty lively here in the summer time. It seems to be a family-oriented area, as we saw a few playground areas along the beach - though not in a loud, neon-lighted Wildwood or busy-boardwalk Ocean City kind of way (with apologies to those who enjoy those types of places).
We met up with L. and daughter A. in the early evening for a very quick tour of parts of the centro storico of Senigallia before picking up M. at work:
Rocca Rovaresca, a Gothic fortress
Foro Annonario, where there is a daily market. The inside of the building was once the fish market - inside you can still see the large stone slab tables where the fish would have been displayed. Today there seems to be a historical exhibit of some kind inside, but we didn't visit that, just peeked through the windows
Inner courtyard, Palazzetto Baviera
After our very quick walking tour, we picked up cousin M. from her place of work and headed to dinner at a nearby restaurant, where we had Neapolitan-style pizza (note that Napoli is about 4.5 to 5 hours southwest of here by car). We certainly had fun trying to communicate with one another. A. speaks some English, so she helped translate a bit; mostly we had to resort to translation apps on our phones. Interestingly, the servers in the restaurant spoke quite good English. I wonder if many British tourists visit during the summers...?
After dinner we walked off some of the calories on a quick tour of the beach/port area. We saw where all the fishing boats dock (I didn't get any pictures of them as it was not particularly well-lit in that area), as well as what appeared to be a boating or yacht club, perhaps - at any rate, there were a lot of sailboats:
We also took a walk out on the pier to see the Rotondo a Mare. I think they host events and exhibits inside; unfortunately, it wasn't open when we were there, so we could not walk all the way around it. But it was still very cool to see lit up at night:
Rotondo a Mare
Fountain, with the Rotondo to the left in the background
View of the town in the early evening
I wish we had planned to spend more time here; it's a charming little town and I'd like to go back and see more of it - perhaps on our next trip!
Up Next: a visit to Cesare's hometown.