Some places you shout about. Others you keep a little quiet, the way you would a good anchorage or a fishing hole. The Monti Sibillini is one we have mostly kept to ourselves. It sits high in the Apennines of central Italy, a national park that most foreign visitors drive straight past on their way to Rome, or Florence, or a Tuscan farmhouse with a swimming pool. Their loss, quietly, is our gain.
Our favourite pitch up here is a high plateau where the road runs out of ambition and the grass takes over. You park, you level up, and you wait for morning. When it comes, it comes in layers: cloud pooled in the valleys below, the last of the season’s snow still holding on the peaks, and a silence so complete that the click of the kettle feels rude.
A place the guidebooks forgot
What we love about the Sibillini is exactly what keeps it off the international itinerary. It does not sell itself. There is no queue, no ticket office, no coach park. The Italians know it well, and rightly treasure it, but the names that pull the foreign crowds are all somewhere else. So the plateau stays as it is: wide, open, ringed by mountains, and largely empty but for the wind and the odd shepherd.
We sent the drone up at first light, mostly because a view like this deserves to be seen whole. From above you understand the shape of the place in a way you never quite do from the ground: the long sweep of the plateau, the folds of the hills, the single thin track we had followed up the evening before. It is the kind of morning that makes you glad you set an alarm on holiday, which is not a sentence we write often.
We have come back to this spot more than once now, and we will again. It is the sort of high, quiet place that reorders your sense of what a good day needs, which is not much: a level pitch, a long view, and nobody else for miles. We will tell you it is beautiful. We will even show you the photographs. We will just be a little vague about exactly where to turn off.
