Ah Italia!

I was reading this article in the NYT about the next Tuscany. The Le Marche region is not yet overrun by tourists, still sporting that winding road charm, and full of lush rolling hills and vineyards.

This is what Tuscany must have felt like 10 or 20 years ago, before it was discovered by tour groups and their omnipresent buses - carrying thousands upon thousands of travelers who flock there each year to try to recreate the pleasures of "Under the Tuscan Sun." One Tuscany wine-growing area is so crowded with British expatriates and second-home owners that that country's press calls it Chiantishire. In short, Tuscany, for all its undeniable charms, is an increasingly challenging place to have an intimate encounter with true Italy.

Seasoned travelers have begun casting about elsewhere for that authentic experience. In the last two years, the British, those shock troops of Italian tourism, have been filling cheap Ryanair flights to a revived Puglia, Italy's sun-bleached stiletto heel. Some observers have anointed a cleaned-up, post-Mafia Sicily the Next Big Thing. But others are heading to the calf of Italy's boot, to Le Marche, a small, diverse province rising from the Adriatic Sea to the 6,000-foot peaks of the Apennines. In between lies a Tuscan-like rumple of lavender fields, sunflower fields and vineyards spread across hills that hump off toward every horizon like a patchwork quilt on an unmade bed. In 2003, according to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, Le Marche had just 7 percent as many visits by foreigners as Tuscany.

What do those fewer travelers find there?

"Italian-ness," says Michael Eldridge, a British photographer and painter who fled what he calls the increasingly theme park feel of Tuscany with his Italian wife nearly five years ago, and converted an old convent in the Sibylline Mountains in the Marches, as the name is rendered in English. He speaks fondly of the region's ancient towns that cap seemingly every hilltop here - towns full of twisty streets but often empty of tourist buses and English accents.

I want to go!!!