The Letter — No. 1 — 20 August 2026
Two farms in the Marche that take the enquiry themselves
This is the first Letter. It exists because of a gap we kept running into: the stays worth a week of your life in Italy are often the ones with no booking button, and no way to be found unless you already know the valley. So we started a register of them, and every Thursday two of the entries come here.
Both of this week's are in the Marche, which is the region we read first because it is the one nobody sends you to. Neither takes an online booking. You write, they answer, and the arrangement is between the two of you — we are not in it, and we take nothing on it.
A correction before it goes out, because it is the kind of thing we would want to be told. An earlier draft of this Letter carried a farm near Urbino instead of the first one below. On 16 September 2026 our booking check — rebuilt that day, because the old one was guessing — found two apartments on that farm live and bookable on Airbnb. It left the Register the same day and it left this Letter. The removal is listed on the corrections page with the page that disqualified it.
One thing to hold in mind while you read. Both are labelled Found, not Confirmed. That means we have read their own pages and cross-read the public registers, but the Owner has not yet written back to us. We are asking them this month. When they answer, the label changes and you will see it change.
Montefortino, Fermo — Marche
Agriturismo Santa Lucia dei Sibillini
5 rooms · grain, vegetables, fruit, livestock · Open all year · €40–80 per person, bed and breakfast to full board
Eighty hectares in the frazione of Santa Lucia, six kilometres above Montefortino, on the Fermo side of the Sibillini. Wheat, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, and cows, sheep, pigs, rabbits and poultry. The wheat is milled into the flour that becomes the pasta and the pizza put in front of you, which is a shorter supply chain than most restaurants can claim. Five rooms of fifteen to eighteen square metres, each with its own bathroom, sleeping two to four. Open all year, €40 to €80 per person depending on how many meals you take. The site is in Italian only and gives a phone number and an address to write to; there is no other way in, which is why the enquiry letter on the entry is there to copy.
Fiastra, Macerata — Marche
Agriturismo degli Alti Pascoli
4 rooms · grain, dairy, livestock, vegetables, wine · Open all year · €60–120 per night for a double room, bed and breakfast to full board
Eighty hectares at 830 metres above Lago di Fiastra, in the Sibillini. Sheep, goats, pigs, poultry and game, a working dairy, white and red wine, and vegetables. Four rooms in the restored stone farmhouse, and two apartments — four beds and six — a few kilometres off. Open all year, which at that altitude means the winter is part of the offer, not an apology for it. The site asks you to phone or email; there is no other way in. Their Italian is the only language on the page, so the enquiry letter on the entry is worth copying.
Next Thursday: two more, probably from Umbria or the Maremma, depending on who writes back first. If a region you are actually planning is missing, the region pages have a line where you can say so, and we read every one.
If you know someone planning Italy, forward this. That is our whole growth plan.