Day 12 - Pesaro to Senigallia - Oh The Places You'll Go - 2025

April 22, 2025

Day 12 - Pesaro to Senigallia

The Tomato

We woke up this morning to beautiful blue skies and a gentle breeze from the north, more or less perfect conditions for today’s modest ride. We felt no pressure to get up and moving so we took our time over the quite good breakfast at the hotel.

As it was Tuesday (you’ll hear more about this) after a holiday weekend, the breakfast room just had a few other people, and nobody looked like they were in a hurry.

Once we were ready to push off, K suggested we take our ritual ‘start of the day’ picture at ‘The Tomato’.

Had this conversation taken place yesterday, we would have headed off in completely opposite directions; me heading into the main square in the old town and K heading off to the sea side plaza.

Two nights ago as I was blogging away, I was putting the caption on the picture of the illuminated orb in the old square and referred to this as Pesaro’s “Tomato” (it was round, in a central square, kind of a work of art - good enough for me).

The next morning, yesterday, K was performing one of her essential tasks, proofreading and providing a massive number of spelling and punctuation corrections to what I’ve written before it goes out to the great wide world. I’m grateful for this as it preserves the illusion that I’m somewhat literate.

K also has to make a few factual corrections (other than spelling and grammar) and that’s where she spotted my ‘Tomato” faux pas.

‘That’s not the Tomato” she exclaimed, ‘it’s down by the beach, you know the famous bronze sculpture”.

Me, “Oh yeah, that one”.

Later that evening as we were strolling down the beach walk after dinner we came to ‘The Tomato”. Cool sculpture. It’s round with a few cut-outs. It’s situated in its own reflecting pool.

But it doesn’t look like a tomato.

Not. One. Bit.

Even K agreed and we were both a little perplexed how we had come to believe that this was called “The Tomato”.

This puzzle was solved this morning when K did a little more investigation and found out the sculpture, whose proper name is ‘Big Sphere’ was created by Arnoldo Pomodoro….. ahhh Arny Tomato!

Now it all made sense, and it turns out most folk in Pesaro refer to it as ‘la palla di Pomodoro” - The Tomato Ball.

It also turns out it was created for EXPO’67 in Montreal (that both K and I went to a young kids) and was then donated by the artist to Pesaro. Small world. Big Tomato.

A very long story for one start of the day pic, but it’s a short day and we need something to fill the page.

If you’ve read this far you’ll also have more insight into the intellectually challenging and sometimes philosophical discussions that fill our days while we’re on the road.

And by the way, it took us quite a while to get the start of the day pic. You’ll see in the ‘official’ pic that there’s a guy wandering around in the wading pool. He was there for the duration and seemed to have a sense of stewardship, maybe even ownership of the big ball. I figured he had to stay uncropped in at least one of the pics.

I don’t know how RWGPS come up with the elevation figures. Both K and I use Garmin Forerunner watches to record our rides. Her’s had 31 m of elevation gain, which seems right. Mine had 62 m, which seems to be a bit of a stretch, yet by the time my Garmin file gets imported and processed by RWGPS 62 has turned into 169! The takeaway from all this - today was flat.

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The pics

And here we are, setting off for the day from Pesaro. I think that’s Anthony (aka Tony) Pomordoro, the son of the sculptor Arnoldo Pomodoro, in the background.

The rest of the day was straight south cycling along beaches with a few jogs into the small towns along the way.

It was Tuesday, every retired guy’s favourite day, meaning that there were far fewer people around, and the towns and beach resorts had a much lower key feel.

It was actually really good stress free biking. We stopped quite often for pic’s as today was a great day for photos, a beachside coffee at 11 and several ‘just because’ stops to admire the views.

In no time we were pulling into Senigallia, our destination for the day.

Why here? I mentioned yesterday that we were in a bit of a ‘slow walk’ to get to Ancona as our ferry doesn’t depart until tomorrow night. As an aside, I checked SNAV’s timetable to make sure they haven’t canceled the sailing, and it turns out that our boat tomorrow is the first one of the season for SNAV. They only do the Ancona Split run from 23 April through 5th October. Lucky us!

When we were planning the trip we also saw that this area between Pesaro and Ancona has a high concentration of very highly rated restaurants, including a rare Three Star Michelin, right here in Senigallia. That’s why we planned another ‘pampering dinner’ in this area tonight - but not at the three star, we’re going down market from that but it should still be pretty good.

The pic’s can lay out the rest of the day. Tomorrow it’s ‘sailing to Split’!

Ten minutes into the ride, still along the beach but we’re out of the hotel zone. Sweet

The beach equivalent of taking a Zamboni to the ice.

About an hour into the ride. Not much has changed!

Italians love their dogs (who doesn’t?). These guys were having a great time on the beach.

A bit of a zoom-in to catch the vineyards

Any fishermen out there? The implements on the front of these boats look to me like they’re for harvesting shell fish.

We’re now in Senigallia. Although the beach looks the same, the area from Fano to here has a much more ‘low key’ beach scene feel. We like it.

Digging for something. She was at this for quite some time but couldn’t figure out what for.

K reports that the water was very warm but no one seems to be in it.

Walking north along the Senigallia beach towards the harbour.

This is the entrance to Uliassi, the 3 star Michelin. Pretty unassuming.

Great location beside the harbour and beach

Our more modest light lunch at the very nice Il Mare in Terrazza. K’s little Tuna Burgers

Now for our ‘down market’ dinner. We were at La Madonnina del Pescatore, Mariella and Moreno Cedroni’s family run establishment that’s been innovating here for 41 years.

It was amazing, sophisticated, innovative and very fun in many unexpected ways.

They had 2 set menus, one based on their 40 years of greatest hits and the other based on what they were currently up to, and that was fish bones. We went with the fish bones.

We’ll just give you the highlights of this 14 round extravaganza.

So we thought the three star place looked unassuming, well these folks are not to be outdone!. We’ve probably cycled by a dozen or so places over the last few days that looked like this and never gave them a second look …. But maybe we’ll pay more attention now!

Their herb garden growing across the street by the beach (with the addition of my finger tip).

And the beautiful cloud formations looking north along the Adriatic

A very stylish and modern interior, once again we were the first to arrive but is was full 30 minutes later

The amuse, and was it ever amusing. The wafer was anchovy bones, an octopus and various herbs and chilies compressed into a rice cracker, the croissant had complete anchovies (one of the few things that retained it’s original form) and a tomato and celery margarita

A simply amazing oyster with sea buckthorn, the shining star in a galaxy of great things

Amberjack with rosehips, apple and caramelized sea lettuce

Celeriac Tart Tatin, rose ice cream, vanilla sauce and balsamic jam

Sweet fish bones - really! Powdered fish bone (this was in most of the dishes we had) with chocolate.

And you scooped it off the plate with your fingers. Oh to be a two year old again!

After dinner we got a tour of ‘the lab’ where they age and prepare some of the food and try out new things. So cool!

Kirsten’s going over ‘fish bone preperation’ with Alessandro - the ‘lab’ tech!

….. and then they moved on to the kamboucha … which was fantastic, like the whole evening

SOTD

Bones by Fat Freddy’s Drop …. This is a reddo from our last tour, but when Moreno was at our table explaining his fish bones reduction (with childlike enthusiasm and wonder), well …..

‘Put them bones in the water, leave them all day ….’

Today's ride: 37 km (23 miles)
Total: 649 km (403 miles)

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Rich FrasierWhat a cool meal! Your choices inspire me - I have to up my trip planning game.

One note - paella di Pomodoro is probably not right. It should be "palla" instead of "paella" if the word is "ball". "palla" = "ball" in Italiano.

Loving your tour!
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1 week ago

Lyle McLeodTo Rich FrasierHi Rich,
Thanks for the kind comments. Not everyone’s a foodie but we do have a solid core that are!
Good catch on the tomato ball. Remember my comment about the massive amount of spellchecking I need. This one slipped through and I think I’ll blame autocorrect for that one, plus poor eyesight and late night typing.
On the ferry to Split and will probably loose cell signal soon. Croatia when we wake up.
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1 week ago

Karen PoretCaught one.. “lose cell signal”, not “loose”..Hope the “other K” doesn’t mind.
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1 week ago