Saints, Frescoes & Gothic Spires:
Four Great Cities of Umbria

The medieval towns nearest Casa Luna are intimate places — small, walled, easily walked in an afternoon. But Umbria also holds cities of a grander order: places that shaped the spiritual and artistic history of Italy, that drew popes and pilgrims and painters, and that still pulse with the life of working capitals rather than preserved museums. Four of them sit within comfortable day-trip range of the Niccone Valley. Each one deserves a day of its own. Together they form a portrait of Umbria at its most ambitious — the green heart of Italy beating at full strength.

Assisi: The City of Saint Francis

No city in Umbria is more famous, and none rewards a visit more completely. Assisi rises in tiers of pink-and-white stone along the slope of Monte Subasio, about forty-five minutes south of Casa Luna, and it has been a destination for pilgrims and travellers for the better part of eight centuries. This is the birthplace of Saint Francis, the gentle revolutionary who renounced his family's wealth to embrace poverty and preach to the birds, and whose influence on Western Christianity is impossible to overstate. But you need not be religious to be moved by Assisi. The city is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful and atmospheric places in all of Italy.

The Basilica di San Francesco dominates the Assisi skyline — its frescoed interior is one of the great treasures of European art

The centrepiece is the Basilica di San Francesco, a UNESCO World Heritage Site built in the mid-thirteenth century to house the tomb of the saint. It is really two churches, one stacked upon the other, and the walls of both are covered in frescoes by the greatest painters of the age — Giotto, Cimabue, Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti. The cycle of Giotto's frescoes depicting the life of Saint Francis, in the Upper Basilica, is one of the foundational works of Western art: the moment painting began to turn from medieval symbolism toward the human realism that would define the Renaissance. To stand before them is to stand at a hinge point in the history of how human beings have looked at the world.

Beyond the Basilica, Assisi is a city for wandering. The steep cobbled streets, the Piazza del Comune with its Roman Temple of Minerva, the Basilica di Santa Chiara dedicated to Saint Clare — all of it repays slow exploration. The historic centre is closed to most traffic, which gives the city a hushed, contemplative quality, particularly in the early morning before the day-trippers arrive and in the evening after they leave. If there is one regret visitors commonly voice about Assisi, it is not having stayed long enough.

For lunch, climb away from the Basilica into the upper town, where the trattorias serve Umbrian classics — strangozzi pasta, wild boar, lentils from nearby Castelluccio — to a quieter, more local crowd. A glass of Montefalco red and a plate of something slow-cooked, eaten at a table with a view down across the Umbrian plain, is the proper reward for a morning of frescoes.

Perugia: The Living Capital

If Assisi is contemplative, Perugia is alive. The regional capital, just thirty minutes from Casa Luna, is a true city — a university town with two ancient universities, a population that spills into the streets each evening, and the kind of confident urban energy you do not find in the hill villages. It is built on a commanding hilltop, layered with Etruscan, Roman, and medieval history, and crowned by one of the most magnificent civic spaces in Italy.

The Corso Vannucci, Perugia's grand pedestrian boulevard, leads to the Palazzo dei Priori and the Fontana Maggiore

The heart of the city is the Corso Vannucci, a broad pedestrian boulevard lined with cafés and palaces that functions as Perugia's open-air living room. At its end stands the Palazzo dei Priori, one of the great Gothic public buildings of Italy, which houses the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria — the region's foremost art museum, with masterpieces by Perugino (the city's own son, and Raphael's teacher), Piero della Francesca, and Fra Angelico. In front of the palazzo sits the Fontana Maggiore, a thirteenth-century fountain carved by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano that is among the finest medieval fountains in existence.

Perugia rewards the curious. Descend beneath the city into the Rocca Paolina, a sixteenth-century fortress built over an entire medieval neighbourhood — you walk through buried streets and houses, an eerie subterranean city preserved in stone. Above ground, the views from the Giardini Carducci stretch for miles across the valley toward Assisi. And in the evening, when the students and families come out for the passeggiata, the Corso fills with the warm, unhurried sociability that is the real soul of Italian city life. Perugia is also, gloriously, the home of Italian chocolate — the Baci you find everywhere in Italy are made here, and the city hosts a celebrated chocolate festival each autumn.

Of the four cities here, Perugia is the one to choose if you want a full day with everything close at hand — art, architecture, shopping, and some of the best people-watching in Umbria, all within a few minutes' walk on the hilltop.

Gubbio: The Grey City of Stone

Gubbio is the most dramatic of the four, and in some ways the most atmospheric. About forty minutes from Casa Luna, it climbs the steep flank of Monte Ingino in tiers of pale grey limestone, austere and vertical and unmistakably medieval. It is sometimes called the "grey city" for the colour of its stone, and the nickname suits it: there is something severe and ancient about Gubbio, a sense of a town that has changed very little since the Middle Ages. It looks, as more than one visitor has noted, like a film set for a medieval epic — except that it is entirely real.

The vast Palazzo dei Consoli rises above Gubbio's rooftops — a fourteenth-century statement of civic power and ambition

The city is dominated by the Palazzo dei Consoli, an enormous fourteenth-century public palace that towers over the rooftops on its great vaulted substructure. Inside, the Museo Civico holds the famous Eugubine Tablets — seven bronze tablets inscribed in the ancient Umbrian language, the most important surviving document of that lost tongue and one of the most significant artefacts of pre-Roman Italy. The views from the palazzo's loggia, out over the russet rooftops to the plain below, are among the finest in Umbria.

Gubbio's most extraordinary moment comes each year on the fifteenth of May, with the Corsa dei Ceri — the Race of the Candles. Three teams, each carrying an enormous wooden pillar topped with the statue of a saint, run at breakneck speed through the crowded streets and up the steep mountain to the basilica of Sant'Ubaldo at the summit. It is one of the oldest and most fervent traditional festivals in Italy, a thunderous, deafening act of communal devotion that has been performed for some nine centuries. If your stay coincides with it, go — there is nothing else like it. At any time of year, you can ride the curious open-cage funicular, the funivia, up Monte Ingino to the basilica for sweeping views and a taste of the mountain air.

Gubbio is also one of the great centres of Umbrian ceramics, a craft practised here since the Renaissance. The workshops along the main streets sell hand-painted maiolica in the deep lustrous reds for which the town was once famous across Europe. A piece of Gubbio ceramic, chosen in the workshop where it was made, is among the most enduring souvenirs the region offers.

Orvieto: The Golden Cathedral on the Rock

Orvieto is the furthest of the four — about an hour and a quarter from Casa Luna, at the southwestern edge of Umbria — and the extra distance is repaid many times over. The city sits atop a sheer plateau of volcanic tufa rock, rising abruptly from the valley floor like a natural fortress, and it holds one of the most astonishing buildings in all of Italy.

The facade of Orvieto's Duomo — a Gothic masterpiece of golden mosaics and carved stone, seven storeys of dazzling detail

The Duomo di Orvieto is the reason most people come, and it does not disappoint. Begun at the end of the thirteenth century, its facade is a Gothic masterpiece of breathtaking ambition — a towering screen of golden mosaics, intricate carved reliefs, and rose windows that seems to catch fire in the afternoon light. Inside, the Cappella di San Brizio holds a fresco cycle of the Last Judgement by Luca Signorelli that is one of the supreme achievements of the early Renaissance — muscular, terrifying, and so admired that Michelangelo is said to have studied it before painting the Sistine Chapel.

But Orvieto has a hidden dimension too, quite literally. Beneath the city lies a labyrinth of caves, wells, and tunnels carved into the soft tufa over nearly three thousand years, from Etruscan times onward — Orvieto Underground, a subterranean city that can be explored on guided tours. Above ground, the Pozzo di San Patrizio is a remarkable sixteenth-century well, a deep cylindrical shaft with a double-helix staircase engineered so that mules could descend one ramp and ascend another without meeting. And Orvieto gives its name to one of Italy's classic white wines — the crisp, mineral Orvieto Classico, best enjoyed in a sun-warmed piazza after a morning underground.

Of the four, Orvieto asks the most of your day and gives the most in return. The drive south is itself a pleasure, threading through some of the loveliest country in Umbria, and the sight of the city rising on its rock as you approach is one you will not soon forget.

Making the Most of Four Cities

You will not see all four in a single visit, and you should not try. Each of these cities deserves an unhurried day — a morning for the great monuments, a long lunch, an afternoon of wandering, and ideally a coffee in the main piazza as the light turns gold. The pleasure of staying at Casa Luna is precisely that you can choose one each day at your leisure, returning each evening to the quiet of the Niccone Valley, the pool, and the hills. Perugia and Gubbio are close enough for a relaxed half-day if you prefer; Assisi and Orvieto reward a full one.

What unites them is a quality that defines Umbria as a whole: a richness of history and art and beauty that has never been overwhelmed by tourism, never turned into spectacle. These are real cities, lived in and loved by the people who call them home, and they welcome the visitor who comes with curiosity and time. From your base in the valley, all four are yours to discover — and a week is barely enough to do them justice.