Portonovo Food Culture

Wild mussels, quickly steamed over a wood fire, arrive still popping in their shells. The meat is custard-tender, the liquor inside tastes like a storm cloud.

Thick worm-shaped pasta made from bread crumbs, eggs and nutmeg, pushed through a ricer straight into murky fish broth. The dough is soft enough to bite through with your tongue. The broth carries the iodine sting of rockfish bones.

Green Ascolana olives, pitted and stuffed with pork, veal, lemon peel, then breadcrumbed and fried in lemon-scented oil. The crust crackles like thin ice. The meat inside steams perfume.

Stockfish dried on Conero cliffs, rehydrated for three days, cooked in tomato, black olives, potatoes. The fish fibres separate into silk ribbons. The sauce is deep enough to drown in.

Sponge soaked in espresso, anise liqueur and mustard-pear jam, wrapped in chocolate fondant. The name means "little brunette"; it tastes like a rum-dunked tiramisu wearing a leather jacket.

Fish stew, but only five species allowed: scorpion fish, weever, tub gurnard, moray, slipper lobster. Cooked in a copper pot shaken, never stirred, so the bones don't break. The broth is brick-red and sharp with vinegar pepato.

Not a dish. But you will be stared at if you order anything else. Cherry-coloured, smells like rosewater and wet stone. Cold-serve at 12 °C.

Mountain tomatoes, skinned by hand, bottled in August with black basil that grows wild on Conero slopes. Winter breakfast: hot passata poured over stale coppo bread, finished with raw garlic.

Soft pork sausage, spreadable as Nutella, smoked with cherry wood then aged twenty days. Eat on hot piadina that melts the fat into pink lava.

Sangiovese plus Montepulciano, aged two years in Slavian oak. Tastes like sour cherry rolled in pipe tobacco. Drink it at cellar temperature with anything that once had hooves or gills.

Miniature pastry filled with cocoa custard and mustardo (grape must jelly). One bite collapses powdered sugar onto your shirt like first snow.

Tiny whole fish - anchovies, sardines, red mullet - dredged in semolina, fried in grapeseed oil so hot it sings. You eat heads, tails, eyes. Served in a paper cone.

Raw mussels opened to order, dressed only with oil, lemon, cracked pepper. Texture between oyster and jellyfish. Flavour like seawater carbonated.

Le Marche lasagna: five layers of spinach pasta, ragù of chicken giblets, béchamel scented with nutmeg, topped with Parmesan aged 30 months. Served in a scalding ceramic dish that keeps cooking after it leaves the oven.

Espresso corrected with a thimble of Meletti anise liqueur. The liquor clouds the crema into galaxies. The taste is liquorice struck by lightning.