Venice has too many of them, while Le Marche is desperately trying to lure them. No, it's not pigeons or gondoliers, but American tourists. While Venice is awash in outsiders, Le Marche has started an aggressive Internet campaign to get visitors to detour to the coastal areas. Venice is overcrowded and its officials are begging tourists to stay away. Since 1999, Mayor Massimo Cacciari and his staff have tried hard to convince visitors to go somewhere else. He installed giant plungers near the Grand Canal as a symbol to represent the unwanted elements clogging the city.

Cacciari also hired controversial advertising firm Benetton to create ads showing pigeons on the attack -- attacking tourists! But, despite all of their efforts, the tourists keep coming -- flocking to Venice, as the pigeons do -- much to the woe of the coastal city of Le Marche, whose mayor would kill for the foot traffic that Piazza San Marco sees in a day. The officials there are going to their own extremes in order to boost tourism with a new online campaign.

Le Marche (the Marches) is a sliver of land on the Adriatic Sea. The closest that most American visitors get to the region is when they visit nearby Tuscany on the well-worn tourist path that includes Venice, Florence, Rome and, perhaps, the Amalfi coast. And that is just the problem for Le Marche: Foreign tourists haven't heard of it and many Italians think of it -- if they think of it at all -- as a string of cheesy Adriatic beach towns with gritty sand and browned bodies who are vying for a patch of overcrowded beaches.

So this year, the region's tourist board swung into action, launching four new websites, an 800 number manned by English- and Italian-speaking operators, and a slogan they hoped would position them as a tourist area for Net-savvy travelers: "Have a Nice Clic." While most Italian travel websites look stale by American standards, Le Marche has invested heavily in promoting itself online.

"This is our invitation to the world," says Le Marche tourist board spokesman Paolo Galli. "By 'have a nice clic,' we mean 'have a nice trip.' Go with a click to our site, go to see us and then contact us."

The tourism board will soon promote its website on trains and billboards to help spread the message. One of its slogans hypes Le Marche as "Italy all in one region" It cites a list of the region's attractions, such as 150 kilometers of coast line, 500 piazzas (town squares), more than 1,000 significant monuments and two national parks. Federica Giordano, who used to serve as a guide on a tour bus in Le Marche, said that many American tourists come in on luxury cruise liners in the region's major port city, Ancona. But the bus bypassed what Giordano terms as the "spiaggone" (big, tourist beaches), such as Rimini, in and around Le Marche in favor of highlighting the artistry of smaller countryside towns.

Rimini, which is technically not in Le Marche but in the state of Emilia-Romagna, is a beach town that is shunned for more aesthetically pleasing areas, similar to Daytona Beach or Seaside Heights, N.J., in the United States.

"Of course, Le Marche is less rich in history, art and culture than Tuscany, which is nearby," she says. "It is no Venice or Florence."

But, being a tour guide and having spent all of her summers growing up in Le Marche, Giordano bristles at the idea that many Italians find the area -- especially the beach towns -- as not worth the visit. Le Marche has its share of natural beauty and quaint small towns full of art and architecture, such as Urbino, which flourished during the Renaissance. (This is Italy, after all.) But some of the northern beach towns give the region an unappealing reputation that keeps visitors away.

Despite doing his search online for an Italian destination for spring break, Robert Guadagno, a sophomore at Wesleyan University, said he and his travel partner have no plans to make a detour to Le Marche.

"If I wanted to go someplace and do the big beach thing, I'd go to Cancun or one of those MTV spots," he says. "Places like Venice, Rome and Florence have such historical significance. How could you not go to those places when you are going to Italy?"

TRIVIA:
The traveler is active. He goes strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive. He expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes sightseeing. (Daniel J. Boorstin -- "The Image")

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