Visit date: May 2, 2019, around 4pm, overnight
Staying in a beautiful village for the third day in a row. We came to a village called Materica in the mountains of central Marche. The town itself has a long history, people settled there around the 1st century BC, and then it expanded under the Roman Empire.
We decided to stay in this village for the day. It is really a small village in the countryside, so the accommodation cost was the cheapest on this occasion. It was difficult to find a parking lot at first, but there was a large, free public parking lot on the northwest side of the village, which was very easy to find, and it was relatively close to the center of the village.
First we took our luggage to the hotel to check in. It is a local village, a beautiful village, but I think there were more citizens than I expected. I think there were also moderate tourists. Still, I thought that there are many places in the city is under construction. On the way to the hotel, I passed by the village hall and the church in Piazza Enricomati, but I couldn’t enter the Suffragio church because it was under restoration.
We found out the next day why there were so many restoration areas. As a matter of fact, this area was damaged by the earthquake that hit central Italy on August 24, 2016. Although Materica is far from the epicenter of the quake, the damage seemed to have been felt here as well. The next day, we visited a beautiful village a little further south, but the damage was more serious there.
However, the restoration was only in some old buildings, and the town was usually lively and good atmosphere. After checking in the hotel, and the next morning, we walked around the city a bit.
This is the hotel where we were taken care of.
It is a city from the Roman era, so it seems that the ruins of the old days are lying around under the city. As you can see in front of the hotel.
Although we were not able to visit the central church inside, we were able to freely visit the inside of another church, Santa Maria Church, in the village of Materica.
Now this city has a DOC wine called « Verdecchio Materica ». Verdecchio is a typical Marche variety, very light and fruity, with a little bit of minerality, not a good way to describe it, but it’s a dry wine with a rather cheap and affordable taste. However, the taste of Verdeckio seems to be different between the sea side and the mountain side. On the mountain side, the minerality is relatively stronger, and on the mountain side, the fruitiness is relatively stronger.
Materica’s Verdicchio is located in the mountains, so it’s lightly dry, but with a slightly fruitier finish.
So I decided to buy some souvenirs of easy and delicious wine. Apparently, there is a large wine shop in the suburbs, so we drove there to buy some before dinner. It was really cheap, 11 euros for such a big bottle (about 5 liters). It’s a very good wine. I wanted to buy this back home but it was too heavy for me lol.
Dinner is at the hotel restaurant.
Of course we ordered a bottle of local Verdecchio Materica wine, 0,5 litre, but even a litre is only 4 euros!
The meal was casual and standard, a change from yesterday. The style of eating with olive oil drizzled freely is still alive and well in Marche (the day before was right in Umbria).
It was a difficult village to get to in the mountains, but it was a wonderful place with more people and more activity than I expected. There are many beautiful villages on the mountain side of the Marche, so you will never get bored driving around.
