In Ancona, the only Italian city where the sun rises and sets over the sea
Ancona curls into the Adriatic like a bent arm, which is exactly what its Greek name means: elbow. That shape gives it a rare trick. It is the one city in Italy, and among very few anywhere, where you can watch the sun both rise and set over water.
The city lies about 280 kilometres northeast of Rome, tucked between the hills of Monte Astagno and Monte Guasco at the edge of the Conero promontory, a sharp contrast with the flat coast to the north. About 99,469 people lived there in 2025. It is capital of the Marche region and one of the Adriatic's main passenger ports.
Picene communities held the area until Greeks from Syracuse arrived around 387 BC and named it Ankon, after the elbow-shaped headland that sheltered the harbour. They set up a factory producing Tyrian purple dye, built a temple of Aphrodite on the Guasco hill where the cathedral now stands, and honoured Diomedes as their mythical founder. Its coins carried a punning bent arm. Because Syracuse had itself been founded by Dorians from Corinth, locals are still nicknamed Dorici.
Rome absorbed it gradually; the town kept using Greek and minting its own money for about a century. Julius Caesar seized it right after crossing the Rubicon. Trajan enlarged the port, the closest to Dalmatia, with his architect Apollodorus of Damascus, and in 115 the Senate raised a plain single-arched marble arch in his honour, praising him for making the entrance to Italy safer. The harbour even appears on Trajan's Column, with the fleet departing for war in Dacia.
Goths, Lombards and Saracen raiders who burned it in 840 all left their mark, and after Charlemagne it headed the March of Ancona, source of the region's name. After 1000 it became a maritime republic, a rival to Venice and ally of Ragusa and Byzantium, governed by six elders and minting a coin called the agontano. It repelled imperial armies in 1137, 1167 and 1174 and sent ships on crusade. Apart from a spell under the Malatesta from 1348 to 1383, it stayed free until 1532, when Pope Clement VII absorbed it into the Papal States and built a massive citadel.
Source: Ancona
