Autumn is perhaps the most romantic season of the year, the one that invites you to long and slow walks in the woods in search of fascinating colors that touch all the shades of reds and yellows, passing through oranges, ochres, bricks and burgundy, in a saraband of colors that can only leave you speechless. The phenomenon of foliage, in fact, attracts more and more enthusiasts, so much so that it has become a real tourist trend, which each region declines in an original way, also enhancing – and above all – territories outside the common routes, where to immerse yourself in nature and reconnect with your own self.
Let’s venture out in search of colored leaves in the Marche, a destination capable of surprising with the variety of its territory, able to charm lovers of marine environments as well as lovers of the sweet landscapes of the hinterland, dotted with villages and unspoiled micro-systems, protected in national parks and nature reserves.
Among beeches, holm oaks, chestnuts and… truffles
We begin our journey from the delightful village of Serra San Quirico (we are in the province of Ancona) dominated by the fourteenth-century Cassero – the main quadrangular defense tower – and embellished by the “covers”, suggestive covered passages that run along the surrounding walls. Outside the town, the lush Gola della Rossa and Frasassi Regional Natural Park opens up, an expanse of beech trees that in autumn turn red-orange and ash, whose small leaves turn burgundy; unmissable is the path that leads to the Vernino caves, an inlet in the rock with a suggestive opening that resembles a keyhole in its shape: from here you can admire, on Mount Murano, an entire wall of a beautiful bright red, covered with shake.
Moving south, you will come across another regional reserve worthy of a stop, that of Monte San Vicino and Monte Canfaito: here too it is the beech trees that seduce, with their umbrellas that take on the colors of pumpkin, mahogany and even wine. novel and with their forms that give life to fantastic and mysterious figures – particularly choreographic are the trees that you meet along the path of Matelica -. Not only that: it is just walking through these beech woods that you can meet one of the three hundred monumental trees of Italy: it is a beech of rare beauty – the largest of all the Marche – about five hundred years old.
Going even further south – not before taking a tour of San Severino Marche, with the remains of its ancient castle, the fourteenth-century village and the characteristic Piazza del Popolo with its oval plan and Camerino, with its intact medieval atmosphere – immerse yourself in the wild and uncontaminated Mountain Nature Reserve of Torricchio: among holm oaks, rovelle and ash trees, which color the autumn with warm and bewitching shades, the most attentive will also be able to see the rare sub-hill pink, with a soft pink color.
And speaking of pink colors, we have now reached the gates of the grandiose National Park of the Sibillini Mountains, which in autumn lights up with the yellow of the chestnut trees, the dark red of the maples, the orange of the beech trees and the pink of the tasty native variety of apples. , a cultivation with ancient traditions which, after having risked disappearing, is today a Slow Food presidium.
Finally, a last stop is a must, combining nature and food and wine: after a walk through the colors of the Gola del Furlo Nature Reserve, where the warm tones of ash, scotani and poplars alternate with the bright green of the holm oaks and are reflected in the Candignano river at the bottom of a suggestive canyon – priceless is the view of the landscape that can be enjoyed from the panoramic terraces of Monte Pietralata – you can stop in Acqualagna, the Marche capital of white truffles, perhaps on the occasion of the famous Truffle Fair, which in ‘2020 edition takes place in October (25 and 31) and in November (1, 7-8 and 14-15) and which has its “twin” in another noteworthy village, Sant’Angelo in Vado, where the Mostra del Tartufo Bianco is staged once again in October (10-11, 17-18, 24-25 and 31) and on 1 November. www.turismo.marche.it
