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In a city that makes the sea one of its most important symbols of communication, cannot miss the tasting of the famous stockfish all'anconitana. Stockfish all'anconitana is the gastronomic symbol of Ancona and already achieved international recognition also the cultural activity of the Academy of Stockfish founded to protect the tradition and for this every year is held a contest of skill which involves the various restaurants of the city. Stockfish all'anconitana, is characterized by a long cooking, by the presence of potatoes in large pieces and a great abundance of wine and oil of oil mill. In the variant to "imbriagona" (drunk) the amount of wine is remarkable. The sauce is also used as a sauce for pasta or polenta.
Fundamental purpose of the Academy, which is not for profit, is protect the typicalness of the dish called Stockfish “all'anconitana", valuing the contents of the roots of tradition. The Academy is born, then, to encode the peculiarity of the recipe according to the historians indexes received to date. The Academy also aims to promote initiatives directed at extending the knowledge of the dish all over the country and abroad to transmit tourism and culture. The history of the stockfish, a delicacy among the traditional products of the Marche, starts from the Lofoten Islands, an archipelago on the north of the Arctic Circle, where on 6th January, 1432 the noble Venetian merchant Pietro Querini ran aground due to a storm. Found, fortunately, a huge fish, the castaways cooked it on the beach doing a great bonfire, which attracted the inhabitants of the island in front. Hosted by them, the Venetians discovered the existence of fishes that harden like wood and dry in the sun and wind without salt, used by Norwegian fishermen as a commodity exchange. In memory of that extraordinary meeting, was installed in 1932 to the Lofoten Islands a monument as a centuries-old sign of the gastronomic and cultural relations between Italy and Norway. Currently, the archipelago is the number one for production of stockfish in the world and Italy is the largest importer.

The crocetta. Another symbol of Ancona, which is caught and eaten only in the stretch of sea from Senigallia (where it is called garagoj) arrives at the capital, is the crocetta (aporrais pespelecani). A gastropod with operculum that, boiled or cooked in porchetta as it is tradition, has a unique flavour, unmistakable. A dish whose tradition is passed down among the local fishermen, with great difficulty: the "chipping" that needs to be done on its shell, through a bench vise and a pincers, not only did not run any more but are no longer even the people who give their time. Yet to the crocetta even the best known of the local dialect poets, Eugenio Gioacchini, dedicated a poem, outlining for metaphor in its rough bark, but the "core bono" (good heart) the characteristic nature of the citizen of Ancona.