Discovering Umbria

Everyone has heard of Tuscany in Italy, but not everyone has heard of Umbria, which is pretty much the region in the very heart of Italy and lying to the east of Tuscany. But many have heard of places like Assisi (the home of St. Francis) and of Perugia, the capital of Umbria. I was in the Umbria region of Italy from the 19th to the 25th May 2026. The main attraction was meeting my dear Italian friend Silvia Barbina who lived in Foligno [also known to be the 'Centre of the World'], and worked in Camerino over the hills. Since my Finnish friend Helena was also in Italy around the same time, she also came over to Foligno, and the three of us had a wonderful time. As we later realised, Foligno was the perfect place to base ourselves to explore the Umbria region. I will tell you why later.

Our 5-day itinerary: 

The first day we roamed about in Foligno, with its very impressive Romanesque cathedral from 1133 and the museum inside the Trinci Palace from the 13th-14th century, with several parts added later. The thing with Italy is that it is usual to find streets lined with palaces back to back, that are all over a couple of hundred years old, but the Trinci Palace of Foligno was rather special with its Gothic staircase and a well inside the building. It housed a very special collection of exhibits besides an archaeological museum and some marvellous late Gothic frescoes by Fabriano done in 1411-1412. The crowning glory of the museum is the tiny chapel covered with striking frescoes done by Ottaviano Nelly in 1420.

Paintings inside the Trinci Palace Museum

The chapel in the Museum with Nelly frescoes

The second day Helena and I did the half an hour train journey to Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis. His relics are also kept in the crypt of the huge double storey Basilica in his honour, the two cathedrals adorned with incredible frescoes by Giotto and other Italian masters of that time. There were special events on in Assisi to mark eight hundred years of St. Francis' death. Visiting it felt really like being on a pilgrimage -- there was such intense spiritual energy in that place. The San Damiano Cross where St. Francis is believed to have heard God speak to him in 1205 AD is also on display in the Cathedral. Assisi is simply splendid -- a walled city with stone houses and numerous churches to Rufino, St. Clare and many others besides the lovely Roman temple to Minerva of the 1st century. 

San Damiano Cross in the Cathedral in Assisi

Frescoes inside the Cathedral

The walled city of Assisi from the fortress Rocca Maggiore

On our way back we stopped by at the tiny little village of Spello, halfway between Assisi and Foligno. Spello, known as the flower village of Umbria, was incredibly pretty everywhere, and has its very own recently discovered House of Mosaics with beautiful floor mosaics from the Augustan (27 BC -14 AD) and the Imperial Age of the 2nd century AD  at one end of the town.

Flowers everywhere in Spello

The third day took Helena and me to Perugia, the capital of Umbria, only about forty minutes away by train from Foligno; the same train that we had taken the day before, the same train that then carries on to Florence. Perugia simply took our breath away, and as we turned the corner and saw the central square,  Piazza IV Novembre, of the city with the giant Fontana Maggiore and the immense St.Lorenzo Cathedral, Helena commented that it was almost too much to take in at one go. I felt the same. 

The Fontana Maggiore from the St. Lorenzo cathedral

The Etruscan Arch

 

Perugia has an Etruscan and Roman past, and is even today using roads, squares and palaces that have been there for several hundred years if not thousand.  Below one of the main pedestrian arteries of the city today Corso Vannucci there was an important Roman road. We did a tour of the Perugian underground which took us deep under the cloisters and the altar of the St. Lorenzo Cathedral and told us the story of the city's ancient past, and showed us the earliest Etrsucan walls of the city over which the Romans built their Acropolis. We also visited an ancient Etruscan well and the 3rd century BC Etruscan arch which got itself a new head and makeover by the Roman emperor Augustus.  

                                                                                                         

..

The Madonna delle Grazie

The entrance to the National Gallery in Perugia

The Madonna delle Grazie to be seen inside the St. Lorenzo Cathedral shows the pregnant Mary in a rather unusual pose. We also visited the National Gallery there which currently has a special exhibition of the Giotto's frescoes in relation to St. Francis, marking the 800th anniversary of St. Francis's death, but sacred art, unless you are a complete expert, has the tendency of looking all very similar after the first fifteen minutes. So the wealth of frescoes on display were sadly lost on us. [But both of us had some brief moments of panic when we found ourselves locked, at different points of time of course, inside the same toilet in the Gallery.] 

The beginning of the weekend meant that Silvia would no longer need to go to work. Since Helena was returning to Helsinki on Saturday, after seeing her off to the airport, Silvia and I decided to go in her car to a quiet monastery (Abbazia di Sassovivo) up the hill beyond which was a lovely woods with ancient giant oak trees. The oak trees were spectacular and  the monastery very peaceful. Since there was still some time left, we decided to go to the wine and olive growing town of Montefalco nearby, which is not accessible by train. Reputed to be the prettiest village in Italy, Montefalco simply had a very different flair, and was clearly geared to receive tourists. There was a handicrafts fair on at the central market square. 

Silvia in Montefalco

One of those giant oak trees by the roadside

                 

We walked around through the narrow alleys and paths, had an ice cream and then went to the tiny city museum which was, believe it or not, hosting an exhibition of some photographs of the famous photographer Steve McCurry, who seems to have a special connection to Umbria. We couldn't believe our luck because the exhibition should have ended earlier but had been extended by two weeks! There were some incredible photos of the Umbria region with some spectacular photos taken during the various festivals (more about them below) in the different cities. 

The famous Lippi fresco in the cathedral

The cathedral in Spoleto

On the last full day of my stay, it was a choice between the much-recommended Orvieto (with its splendid cathedral) and Spoleto. In the end I decided to leave Orvieto for next time (also because it is nearer to Rome and hence can be done easily some other time) and we went to nearby Spoleto beyond the pretty little town of Trevi. And I do not regret it at all. Spoleto was up and down again and has a large and imposing Romanesque Cathedral (dating back to the 12th century) with a beautiful Byzantine Mosaic on its central facade. Since it was the Whitsun Sunday (Pentecost) there was Mass going on in the cathedral. Inside the cathedral were some spectacular frescoes by Filippo Lippi and a letter written by St. Francis to his brother. Spoleto has a lot of Roman ruins and we visited a Roman house with lovely floor mosaics and got a glimpse of a large Roman Amphitheatre. But what was impressive about Spoleto were meeting people dressed up in strange attires. We later found out the reason -- the Fantasy Theatre Festival was being held that weekend in the city in the run up to the Two Worlds festival coming up in June. 

Inside the Cathedral in Spoleto

Spoleto's history can be traced back to at least the 8th century BCE; in 241 BC  it became the Roman settlement of Spoletium but remained  important for a very long time as the capital of the Lombardi Duchy that controlled much of mountainous interior of Central Italy from the 6th to the 13th centuries AD. While we were driving back home Silvia mentioned that the road we were driving on was the same ancient road named Via Flaminia built in 220 BCE by the Romans to connect Rome to one of its colonies Arminium on the Adriatic coast. Spoletium was located on the eastern branch of the Via Flaminia and it is this road that Hannibal and his marauding troops had taken on their march southwards before they were supposedly stopped by the citizens of Spoletium!  

And the Roman amphitheatre

The Casa Romana in Spoleto

                

That was what was so fascinating about Italy -- no matter where you were and what you did, there was always so much history attached to everything, and no matter how many photos you took there was so much more to it all than what you saw; I was grateful to have had this opportunity to have seen a relatively quiet and less touristy part of Italy, mountainous with no coasts but to make up for that incredible landscapes and pretty towns each choc-a-bloc with history. Who could have asked for more...

Some general impressions:

Most of the cities we visited (except Foligno) are built on hills obviously for defense purposes. But the train stations which are down in the plains are a little distance away. But each city seems to have worked out a way to handle that problem, if it was the mini-metro service in Perugia, it was a normal bus service in Assisi, and a combination of lifts and escalators in Montefalco and Spoleto. [Foligno was an exception as it was not on a hill and one could walk everywhere in Foligno from the train or bus station, so that was a perfect choice for a base to explore the region using public transport.] 

      

So these densely populated cities perched on hills often with a huge fortress right on top, an ancient and splendid cathedral somewhere in the heart of the city and a large central piazza which is the centre of life and action in the place. Many also would have a large Town Hall, mostly a converted palace or town building located at or near the Piazza. Stone houses line the narrow lanes, pathways and alleys of the city that are mostly up and down, but are all beautifully adorned with flowers or otherwise to make every little entrance look enticing and attractive. 

Inside a church in Perugia

The oil lamp was a beauty

                                

The antiquity of each and every one of these places is what hit me hardest, because it kept hitting me over and over again. Almost all buildings that we saw in the historic centre of these places were at least a few hundred years old, some rebuilt over earlier buildings etc. but still most cities to trace their histories back to the time of the Romans if not the even earlier Etruscans c. (9th to 1st century BCE) and Umbrians (6th to 3rd centuries BCE). So much so that anything Gothic or Baroque seemed almost too recent... I asked Silvia how she felt when she went abroad and found that in some places just a couple of hundred of years old meant ancient, and she said that it was not until she went abroad did she begin to understand what they had everywhere around them. Till then she had taken it for granted.

Scenes from inside the cathedral in Assisi

                      

Inside the Spoleto Cathedral

Everywhere in the churches, cathedrals and palaces were amazing wall frescoes dating back at least to the Middle Ages and beyond... It was hard to imagine how these incredible paintings still had their colour and vitality intact, even when they had not been reworked. The frescoes were on the walls, and if one looked down at the floors, most often than not there were beautiful mosaic floors adorning most buildings. And the sacred art and sculpture to be seen everywhere one looked. One felt incredibly small in the face of such antiquity and such an overload of architectural and artistic mastery. 

[The beautiful Romanesque St. Eufemia church in Spoleto (photos to the left and below) was the only church where we had to pay a couple of euros to get in. But the peace and quiet inside was worth the payment.]

Inside the St. Eufemia church

A fresco in the St. Eufemia church

But these places did not only live in glorification of its past -- these cities also lived in the present. Each city boasted of something that was special and unique to it -- Foligno was the centre of the world (although the actual centre of the world is now just a nondescript slab of stone inside a rather ordinary pharmacy of the city), Spello is the city of flowers, Montefalco has its Sagrantino wine and olives, and Assisi has St. Francis and St. Clare among many others.  

[Both these photos are taken at the Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi. Look closely at the second photo to make sense of the first.]

Moreover, many of these cities host festivals in the summer that are organised by the locals and are well attended. There is a famous Jazz Festival that happens in Perugia every year and the Festival of Two Worlds is a prestigious arts festival that Spoleto hosts every summer for which work was already underway. But even in the tiny town of Spello there is a Festival of Flowers (Infiorata) each year on the Feast of Corpus Christi (on the 6/7th June this year). And on my very last evening in Italy, right in the city square metres away from Silvia's home, we witness the onset of the Quintana Joust Festival with a very colorful (medieval) procession where the flags of the ten districts of Foligno were handed over to the mayor of the city and hung in the Town Hall till the end of the festival.

Since it is not as full of tourists as Tuscany (although in places like Assisi I thought there were more than enough of us) the people are friendlier and still many restaurants and eateries are family based offering local fares which are not crazily expensive. But of course perhaps because it was not so touristy, most people did not speak a lot of English and it was harder than it would be in Rome or Florence, I suppose, to get by with no Italian at all. Charming little shops selling local products as well as attractive summer clothing and accessories were abundant. And people took real pride in doing up the front of their houses with flower pots and vines. Some of the older houses still had very elaborate ornamental facades and some had bits of mosaics and frescoes on their floors and walls, left over from an earlier time. Temperatures rose steadily in the five days that I was there from a cool 20/21 degrees to more than 30 degrees on the Sunday, so much so that I decided that the best thing to do would be to roll down the shutters and stay home and wait for the evening to come.

Helena and my Torta al Testo at the bottom

I loved the food we tried out there -- from the very basic flatbread called Torta al Testo that is locally made in the Umbria region to the Sagrantino wine from the Montefalco area, it was a gourmet's delight -- even simple things like scrambled eggs with truffles one day for lunch and the Focaccia bread with ham and artichokes on another day tasted special.  I also ate the tastiest and tenderest pork at dinner in a restaurant named Me Te Magno in Foligno that specialised in 'slow foods'.  But there was no missing the ubiquitous olive oil that Italians seem to serve with everything. Silvia treated us to some lovely homemade soups twice and also made some lovely pasta with tomatoes and olive oil for dinner one evening. And of course we never missed a chance to have a go at their incredible variety of icecreams -- on the last evening we had pistachio ice cream from a galleteria in Foligno which had just won the prize for making the best pistachio ice cream in the world! 

There were signs of a highly polarised society in some of the places we visited. Talking to Silvia we found out about the resentment of the locals towards immigrants and hence the support for Meloni and her right wing policies. The number of Italians who said no to e-vehicles and to climate change were on the rise, we were told. In the city centre of Foligno, we saw lots of dark skinned immigrants -- Silvia told us they lived in small old buildings in the historic centre that were falling apart and hence cheaper to rent. The narrow roads in these ancient cities were not built for modern day traffic, but Italians still seemed to manage to drive around in those roads and also park in places that were completely prohibited. Garbage collection etc seemed to also be a problem in certain parts and hence some areas were not as clean as one would have expected.

Two things, one from the very first day and one from the last, touched me a little deeper and will stay with me a little longer than everything else -- on the first day while roaming about in Foligno on my own, I just happened to visit the very low and inconspicuous Church of Santa Maria Infraportas with frescoes from the Middle Ages and rather bare... Sitting there in the calm serenity of the empty church I suddenly felt the spirituality of the place, its quiet but palpable energy. I am not a religious person but something clicks in some places in some situations sometimes. And it made me feel happy and secure. 

The Church of Santa Maria Infraportas in Foligno

             

The other thing happened as we were going up the many escalators in Spoleto. First there were giant cut outs of some of the best known faces of artists, actors, writers and musicians who had come over the years to the Two Worlds Festival in the city. But in the final segment there were photos of something else -- there were photos of women who had all survived breast cancer and who had agreed to get photographed showing not just their faces but also their exposed breasts showing the asymmetry and the scars that the disease and its treatment had left. Having just gone through breast cancer treatment myself recently, I thought that was a rather brave statement of hope and strength that those photos conveyed. 

And on my way home, on Silvia's recommendation, I read the book Accabadora by Michela Murgia. It was a very fitting way to end our beautiful holiday because it also conveyed the mood of something simple, authentic and lovely yet deep, mystical and unexplained that carried an invitation to continue to explore further. 

Evening at the Cathedral square in Foligno

                                  

[With big thanks to Silvia for hosting us, to Helena for her company and for many of the photos, and to Silvia, Salvatore and Gian Luca for their inputs about what to do and where to go in Umbria.]