Umbria Travel Guide

Northern Umbria is the mind and soul of the region. The morning mists rolling over the hills of this "green heart of Italy" imbue the place with a sort of magic, an ethereal spirituality that shines from the paintings of Perugino and that has, in the past, coalesced into saints such as Francis and Clare. The capital city, Perugia, is the birthplace of the Umbrian style of painting, which took form during the Renaissance in the work of Perugino and his students Pinturicchio and Raphael. Perugia gets hip each fall with one of Europe's greatest jazz festivals and spends the rest of its time selling Baci chocolates to the world. Nearby Assisi was home to St. Francis, Italy's patron saint and favorite mystic. The basilica raised to honor St. Francis was decorated by the greatest artists of the early Renaissance: Cimabue, Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Giotto.

Umbria's southerly reaches border on Lazio, the province of Rome. The flat plains of the Tiber and other rivers are interrupted only by the green swath of long-sacred mountains (national parkland today) to the east and outcroppings of volcanic tufa to the west, atop which are perched towns that were already ancient when Rome was founded. Within an hour's drive of Rome's outskirts, southern Umbria boasts a heritage deeper, more complex, and more jumbled than its Latin neighbor, having served for millennia as a buffer zone between Rome and its expansion up to central Europe -- and the barbarians' later push south to conquer Rome. The popular culture and architectural legacy of this region draws threads from its many epochs, from the Stone Age through early Umbri settlers, powerful Etruscan colonists, haughty Roman conquerors, iron-fisted Lombard dukes, and centuries of politically active scheming popes who used Spoleto and Orvieto as homes away from the Vatican.