Umbria Guide: Assisi, Hill Towns & Sagrantino

A landscape of walled hill towns, olive groves and vineyards, of saints and truffles and one of the country’s great red wines, read our guide to the quieter, greener counterpart to Tuscany next door.

Umbria is the region that stays gloriously under the radar. Where Tuscany, just across the border, has long since been discovered, Umbria has stayed a step behind: greener, gentler, less polished, its hill towns still working towns and its valleys still farmed. They call it the cuore verde d’Italia, the green heart of Italy. The Tiber runs the length of it; the Apennines rise to the east; and everywhere in between are the folds of oak and olive and vine that give the region its unhurried, deeply lived-in beauty.

There is no beach here, and that is the point. What there is instead is unique culinary traditions, a wine list built on a grape grown almost nowhere else, a spiritual landscape that produced two of the most important saints in Christendom, and a string of hill towns, Assisi, Orvieto, Spoleto, Todi, Gubbio, Spello.

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THE UMBRIAN SETTING

Umbria occupies the middle of Italy. Rome lies a couple of hours to the south, Florence a little less to the north, and the region gathers a countryside of wooded hills and river valleys. What strikes most first-time visitors is how green it all is, and how quiet, especially in contrast to Tuscany. Umbria is smaller, more compact and less trodden; you can cross the whole region in a morning, and yet every valley seems to hold an intriguing walled town, Romanesque church, and view to gaze at.

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ASSISI AND THE SPIRITUAL LANDSCAPE

Built in rose-pink stone quarried from the slopes of Monte Subasio, Assisi climbs the hillside above the Spoleto valley in a series of terraces, glowing at sundown. It is the birthplace of Saint Francis, patron saint of Italy, and of Saint Clare, who followed him, and it remains one of the great pilgrimage destinations of the Christian world.

The Basilica of San Francesco is the reason most people come, and it does not disappoint. Begun in 1228, just two years after the saint’s death, it is built on two levels: a lower, dimmer church heavy with centuries of devotion, and an upper church flooded with light. The walls contain some of the most important works in the history of Western painting. The fresco cycle of the life of Saint Francis, attributed to the young Giotto and his workshop, broke with the flat, gilded Byzantine tradition and set European art on the road to the Renaissance; the lower church also holds work by Cimabue, Simone Martini, and Pietro Lorenzetti. The whole complex is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and rightly so. Beyond the basilica, discover the Basilica di Santa Chiara, the Roman temple of Minerva on the main square, and the steep lanes full of character.

THE HILL TOWNS

Perugia, the regional capital, crowns its hill with an Etruscan and medieval old town gathered along the Corso Vannucci, a grand pedestrian spine that runs from the fountain and the Palazzo dei Priori, home to the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria and its Peruginos, to a belvedere with the whole valley laid out below. It is a lively place, a university city, and it fills each summer for the Umbria Jazz festival and each autumn for Eurochocolate.

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Orvieto sits apart from the rest, perched on a flat-topped volcanic plug that rises sheer from the plain, and its Duomo is one of the supreme Gothic cathedrals of Italy: a facade of gold mosaic and banded stone, and inside, in the Chapel of San Brizio, Luca Signorelli’s tremendous Last Judgment, a work Michelangelo is said to have studied. Spoleto, to the south, wears a great fortress and the Ponte delle Torri, a soaring medieval bridge striding across a wooded gorge; its cathedral holds frescoes by Filippo Lippi, and each summer the town becomes a stage for the Festival dei Due Mondi, the Festival of Two Worlds, founded in 1958 and still one of Italy’s finest gatherings of music, opera, theatre and dance. Beyond them lie Todi, serene above its piazza; Gubbio, grey and vertical on the slopes of Monte Ingino, famous for the headlong Corsa dei Ceri each May; and Spello, whose Roman gates and flower-carpeted lanes come into their own at the Infiorata.

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NORCIA’S CULINARY TREASURES

Norcia is a small walled town in the eastern mountains, the birthplace of Saint Benedict and has given its craft and even its name to Italian cooking: a norcineria is a pork butcher’s shop anywhere in the country, and the word comes straight from here. For centuries, the norcini of Norcia were the acknowledged masters of curing and butchery, and the town’s shopfronts still hang with prosciutto, salami, capocollo, and the local ciauscolo, a soft, spreadable sausage found nowhere else.

Above Norcia spreads the Piano Grande, a vast upland plain beneath the Sibillini that flushes, for a few weeks in early summer, into a haze of wildflowers. From its edges come the Castelluccio lentils, tiny, thin-skinned and prized across Italy, that cook without soaking and anchor the region’s winter table. And then there is the truffle. Umbria is one of Italy’s great truffle grounds, and the black truffle of Norcia is its emblem: shaved over hand-cut pasta, folded into eggs, pressed into the local cheeses, and celebrated each late winter at the Nero Norcia fair. Eat here, and you eat what the hills and woods give up, plainly and superbly cooked, with the region’s green, peppery olive oil poured over almost everything.

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ONE WINE TO KNOW ABOUT

Sagrantino di Montefalco is grown almost exclusively on the hills around the small town of Montefalco, from a dark, thick-skinned grape found virtually nowhere else on earth that is one of the most tannic and long-lived red wines in all of Italy, deep, brooding and built to age. The grape was on the brink of extinction a generation ago; the appellation was raised to DOCG, Italy’s highest tier, in 1992, and today more than seventy growers work these slopes, ageing the wine for over three years before release.

Montefalco itself, nicknamed the balcony of Umbria for the sweep of its views, is the natural base for a day among the cellars, many of them small, family-run estates happy to pour you a glass and walk you through the vines. There is more to drink besides: the softer, Sangiovese-based Montefalco Rosso for the everyday; the crisp white Orvieto, one of the oldest named wines in Italy, and the reds of Torgiano near Perugia. But it is Sagrantino, powerful and unmistakably Umbrian, that visitors remember.

LAKE TRASIMENO AND THE SLOW COUNTRYSIDE

For all its hill towns and high drama, much of Umbria’s pleasure lies lower down, in the soft, farmed countryside that fills the valleys and gathers, in the west, around Lake Trasimeno. The fourth-largest lake in Italy, wide and shallow and rimmed with reeds, it is a gentler world than the mountains: a place of small harbours like Passignano and Castiglione del Lago, of ferries out to the Isola Maggiore and the Isola Polvese, and long, still evenings. Beneath its calm lie layers of history, for it was on these shores in 217 BC that Hannibal ambushed and destroyed a Roman army, one of the bloodiest days in the Republic’s history.

Away from the lake, the countryside settles into a slow rural rhythm that is, in the end, Umbria’s deepest charm, with a landscape of olive groves, most famously around Trevi and Spoleto, whose extra virgin oil carries its own protected name and pours out green and peppery; vineyards and sunflower fields; stone farmhouses tucked into the hills.

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WHEN TO VISIT

Umbria is a region for spring and autumn above all. April to June brings green hills, wildflowers, and warm, settled days, and late May into early July brings the famous flowering of the Piano Grande above Castelluccio, when the landscape turns into a carpet of colour. September and October are the harvest months, ideal for the curious epicurean: the vintage is in, the new olive oil is pressed, the first truffles appear, and the light turns long and golden over the vines. High summer is hot in the valleys but rich in festivals, with Umbria Jazz in Perugia and the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto both falling in late June and July. Winter is quiet and cold, the season of black truffles and open fires, with the Nero Norcia fair drawing food lovers to the mountains in February and March. Whenever you come, this region rewards a slower, longer stay.

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GETTING HERE

A small regional airport, Perugia San Francesco d’Assisi, sits in the valley below Assisi, but it handles only a handful of routes and seasons. Most visitors fly into Rome or Florence and drive instead: from Rome, the region is just over a two-hour drive north; from Florence, around one and a half hours south-east. The train line between the two cities skirts the region and stops at Orvieto, Chiusi, and Terontola, which is useful for reaching a town but less so for a rural stay. In truth, Umbria requires your own transport.

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UMBRIA WITH VILLA COLLECTIVE

Umbria is the green, landlocked heart of Italy, the quieter counterpart to Tuscany over the border, and its reward is the tranquil countryside and deep culinary traditions. Our houses match: restored stone farmhouses and casali set among olive groves and vineyards, with a pool to cool off in and a long view across the valley to a hill town on its ridge. What turns a good week here into an unforgettable one is the team behind it, who know the region from the inside and can open the doors that matter: a truffle hunt in the oak woods near Norcia, a private Sagrantino tasting at a family estate above Montefalco, an unhurried view of the frescoes in the Basilica at Assisi before the crowds, a table held at a remotehilltop trattoria. To begin planning, explore our collection of villas in Umbria or our wider portfolio across the hill towns and coastlines of Italy.

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