Art in the Marche region in September: three festivals in towns and cities

In September 2025, Marche will confirm its position as a creative hub and a hub for a wide range of artistic practices, hosting three festivals that will transform the region into a crossroads of contemporary languages, forms, and visions. From north to south, ancient villages and coastal towns will come alive with performances, installations, street art, and poetry, in an event that celebrates the cultural richness and hospitality of a region increasingly aware of its artistic value.

Among the highlights of this season is the new edition of MArCHESTORIE, which from September 13th to mid-November will travel through dozens of towns, villages, and historic hamlets, offering a collective narrative centered on myths, legends, poetry, and local traditions. The festival, now in its fifth year, focuses on the dialogue between past and present through a myriad of events: open-air theater performances, poetry itineraries, author workshops, guided tours, tastings, and art exhibitions designed to bring vitality to historic centers and less-frequented tourist destinations. The soul of MArCHESTORIE is storytelling, understood as a bond between generations, as a rediscovery of roots that reach toward the future. Poets, musicians, actors, and visual artists convey the multiplicity of the Marche region through stories and new languages, bringing together the memory of the great classics with the region's emerging voices.

The VITA VITA festival in Civitanova Marche represents a unique experience on the national scene: here, living art invades the streets, squares, and theaters in a week of meetings, performances, and music, featuring artists from across Italy and abroad. The twenty-first edition of the festival opens with tributes to the great figures of Italian culture, including a tribute to Franco Battiato, and continues with a series of concerts, street theater, dances, municipal bands, and artistic incursions that transform the city into a veritable open-air stage, engaging residents and travelers alike. At the heart of VITA VITA is the idea that art is a living gesture, a gathering, a body that inhabits the territory and transforms it through the energy of collective creation. It's difficult to distinguish audience from performer: the city becomes a community, each event a promise of social and existential renewal.

In Fermo, "La Buskeria," an international street art festival, is the focus of late summer attention. Between August 21st and 23rd, the historic center and waterfront are filled with musicians, actors, acrobats, and artists from around the world. The event features free nighttime shows, traveling performances, workshops for children, dances, and concerts that showcase the city's welcoming spirit. La Buskeria's program is deliberately open and diverse, featuring companies from Argentina, France, Ghana, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Italy, with a particular focus on the interplay of artistic expressions. The global ferment of urban art meets local traditions and the evocative landscape of the Marche region, in an experiment in conviviality and cross-pollination that reshapes urban spaces.

These events are complemented by numerous other events throughout the region: from the RestArt Festival in Caldarola to the performances of the Artemigrante Festival of Migrant Arts in Macerata, to the Onda d’Arte experiences in Civitanova Marche, where performers, musicians, chefs, actors, and dancers create a large-scale collective celebration that reinvents the city center as a participatory theater and gathering place. Thus, the Marche region in September becomes an explosive mosaic of languages, a laboratory for contemporary art that connects inland areas with coastal communities.

The common thread that unites the Marche region's festivals is the commitment to valorizing widespread heritage, restoring centrality to villages and cities of art through the involvement of local communities and association networks. Art becomes a tool for social cohesion and cultural diplomacy, offering audiences an immersive experience, where enjoyment intertwines with direct participation, discovery with the care of the venues. Each show, performance, workshop, and guided tour transforms into stories to be experienced, memories to be built, and new practices of citizenship.

This year, the Marche region reaffirms the strength of a widespread and innovative cultural offering, capable of engaging diverse audiences thanks to a network of artists, professionals, and governments that invest in quality, accessibility, and international openness. The plurality of languages, the focus on emerging artists, and the fusion of theater, music, visual arts, food and wine, and popular traditions make the September festivals a precious opportunity for exchange and growth.

At the end of this journey through the region's many art festivals, the certainty remains that September in the Marche region represents an unparalleled creative season, a time for encounters, reflection, enjoyment, and experimentation. New stories and new perspectives emerge in the piazzas, theaters, hills, villages, and ports: here, culture is increasingly a driver of development and an opportunity to explore the future, following the traces of a collective history that is renewed thanks to the inexhaustible power of creativity.