Every design for Ancona

Have you ever watched the sun rise out of the sea and, that same evening, sink back into it? In Ancona you can, because the city sits on an elbow of land bent out into the Adriatic, the very bend that the Greek settlers from Syracuse named it after. It is the capital of Marche and one of the Adriatic's main passenger ports, but to the people who live here it is first a cluster of hills wrapped around a harbour.

Home feels like the walk down to the water: past the Loggia dei Mercanti, along the quays to the Arco di Traiano, out towards the Mole Vanvitelliana on its five-sided island. People here are still called "Dorici", and the city still answers to "the Doric city". Up on the Guasco hill the cathedral stands where the Greek acropolis and its temple of Aphrodite once did, keeping watch over the port below.

At the Passetto, beneath the Monumento ai Caduti, a long flight of steps drops to a rocky shore of big white stones, and among them sits the Seggiola del Papa, the rock every Anconetano can point to.