Every July, for eight days, the little hill town of Offagna, a stone village (and one of the Borghi più Belli d’Italia) in the Marche about twelve miles inland from Ancona, stops being a quaint borgo of the twenty-first century and becomes, with remarkable conviction, a town of the fifteenth.
The Feste Medievali di Offagna, which began in the late 1980s and now draw visitors from across Italy, hand the lanes and piazzas over to costumed processions, craft markets, duels, falconry, jesters, and fire-eaters, all of it unfolding from late afternoon until well past dark beneath the great fifteenth-century Rocca crowning the village.
