Italy's Marche takes its name from a medieval word for borderland
Marche, or the Marches, is named after the medieval marca, a frontier zone of the Holy Roman Empire. This hilly Adriatic region gave the world Raphael, Rossini, Leopardi and Maria Montessori, and it passed through Picene, Roman, Byzantine, Lombard and papal hands before a plebiscite joined it to unified Italy in 1860.
One of Italy's twenty regions, Marche lies in the centre of the country with nearly 1.5 million people and its capital at Ancona. It spans 9,366 square kilometres between the Apennines and the Adriatic, with San Marino and Emilia-Romagna above it, Umbria and Tuscany inland, and Abruzzo and Lazio on its southern edge. Two-thirds of the land is hills cut by short rivers. Only Monte Vettore, at 2,476 metres, tops 2,400 metres, and gorges such as the Furlo and Frasassi slice through the range.
In the Iron Age the Picentes held almost the whole area, which Romans knew as Picenum. Gauls called the Senones pushed into the north in the fourth century BC, and after the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BC Rome planted colonies linked to the capital by the Via Flaminia and Via Salaria. Ascoli resisted Rome during the Social War. Goths, the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna, Lombards and finally Charlemagne followed, and between the ninth and eleventh centuries the marches of Camerino, Fermo and Ancona gave the region its plural name.
Papal authority was mostly nominal for centuries. Ancona defied both Frederick Barbarossa and Venice in the twelfth century and acted as a maritime republic, while the Malatesta and Montefeltro families fought over Renaissance towns. Urbino, a jewel of that era and Raphael's birthplace, headed the last independent state, a duchy dissolved in 1631. Napoleon's era brought a brief Republic of Ancona in 1797 to 1798, and papal rule finally ended on 4 November 1860.
Modern history has been rough on the land. Ancona was bombarded in the First World War and fought over in the Second, and the 1916 Rimini earthquakes damaged Pesaro and Fano. Quakes struck again in August and October 2016, and floods hit in September 2022. In 2009, after a referendum, seven Montefeltro towns including San Leo left for Emilia-Romagna. A nineteenth-century railway from Bologna to Brindisi still hugs the coast, because the mountainous interior makes north to south travel slow.
Source: Marche
