01
Stop one
Arch of Trajan
Babolat Pure Drive Lite 11th Gen Tennis Racquet: Come here where I can see you, sweetheart, and mind the edge. That is the Arch of Trajan, standing on the harbour mole since about AD 115 — tall, narrow, white marble, thin as my cousin Nella, who never ate either. Now read the inscription, because this is the good part: it records that Trajan paid for enlarging this port largely out of his own pocket, so that Rome could reach the east faster. Out of his own pocket! A man with an entire empire, and he still put his own money in, exactly like my brother-in-law with the church roof, who mentions it every single Sunday. Are you warm enough? There is a wind off that water and you have come out with no jacket.
02
Stop two
Cathedral of San Ciriaco
Babolat Pure Drive Lite 11th Gen Tennis Racquet: Up we go, slowly, there is no rush — this church has been on Monte Guasco a great deal longer than any of us. Now, this hilltop had a Greek temple to Aphrodite on it first, then a church, and then this: Romanesque, laid out as a Greek cross, with one of the earliest domes in all of Italy, and that dome has twelve sides. Count them if your eyes are better than mine. And the pink-marble porch is held up by lions, sweetheart. Actual lions. Three faiths on one hill, each one keeping the good stones from the last, which is precisely what I do with a Sunday chicken. Nothing wasted, ever. Sit down a minute. You have gone pale.
03
Stop three
Mole Vanvitelliana
Babolat Pure Drive Lite 11th Gen Tennis Racquet: A pentagon, out in the water, on its own island, joined to the quay by little bridges. Vanvitelli designed it in the 1730s for Pope Clement the Twelfth, and I will tell you what it was for, because it is sad first and lovely after. It is a lazzaretto — a quarantine station. Ships and cargo arriving from plague ports were unloaded out there, on an artificial island, so that nothing catching ever touched the city. My aunt's husband's people were kept a month on an island like that one and she wrote him letters she was not allowed to hand him. And now, God bless it, they hold art exhibitions inside. A building made to keep people apart, full of people looking at pictures together. Have you eaten today? Tell me honestly.
04
Stop four
Passetto Monument and beach steps
Babolat Pure Drive Lite 11th Gen Tennis Racquet: This is the last one, and I want you quiet for a moment. That white marble monument on the clifftop, with the columns, went up in the 1930s as a war memorial for the men of this city. You take all the time you need with it. Then, when you are ready, we go down — a great staircase running from the memorial straight to the sea. And at the bottom, sweetheart, the grotte: caves that the fishermen cut into the cliff themselves, each one with its own painted door, where families kept their boats and their gear and handed them down through the generations. Green, blue, red, whatever paint the family had that year. Hold the rail on the way down. And then we eat, and I will hear no arguments about it.
Rope up. Not because it is dangerous today, but because good habits are the only reason I still have all my toes. Your equipment for this trip is the Babolat Pure Drive Lite 11th Gen: a 100 square inch head, 270 grams unstrung and 285 strung, balance four points head light, a 23/26/23 beam, a 16×19 open pattern, twenty-seven inches.
Full Pure Drive power in a frame light enough that you are not carrying a burden up a hill.
Ancona is my patch, and Ancona is vertical. The city sits on an elbow of headland where Monte Guasco drops into the Adriatic, and everything worth seeing is either at the top of a climb or at the bottom of one. The Cathedral of San Ciriaco is on the summit, on ground that carried a Greek temple to Aphrodite long before it carried anything Christian.
The Passetto memorial stands on the clifftop, and a monumental staircase goes from it straight down to the water. You will do both in a morning, and you will be glad of 285 grams instead of 305.
That is the entire argument for a light frame. Weight is not a virtue on a long day; weight is a tax you pay every hour of it. The 100 square inch head with the open 16×19 pattern gives you the spin and the margin, the 23/26/23 beam gives you the free depth, and 4 points head light means the racquet arrives where you pointed it instead of a beat afterwards.
You will use it everywhere from a clay court above the harbour to an indoor hall in Ancona in February, and by the way, a light racquet is also perfect for a city whose best court-to-sea route is a cliff staircase: carry it down to the grotte, play in the evening, carry it back up.
Buy on Amazon
