Umbria Region Guide

Umbria offers most of what draws people to Tuscany, at lower cost and with fewer visitors, plus several things Tuscany does not have.

• Assisi and the Franciscan legacy. The Basilica of St Francis, built from 1228, holds fresco cycles by Giotto, Cimabue, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti — a concentration of early Italian painting that is difficult to overstate. It has been UNESCO-listed since 2000.
• Hill towns that are still towns.Spoleto, Gubbio, Todi, Montefalco and Bevagna have working populations rather than being preserved for visitors, which changes how they feel on a weekday morning.
• Orvieto's cathedral. A striped Gothic façade of mosaic and carved relief, and inside, Luca Signorelli's Last Judgment — the cycle Michelangelo is said to have studied before the Sistine Chapel.
• Food worth travelling for. Black truffle from Norcia, lentils from Castelluccio, and a pork-butchery tradition so identified with one town that norcineria is the Italian word for the trade.
• Sagrantino. A grape grown nowhere else in any quantity, producing one of Italy's most tannic red wines.

What it is not: a coastal region, or a fast one. The hill roads are slow, and much of the pleasure is in not hurrying.

Umbria is compact enough to base yourself in one place and reach most of the region on day trips.

The Franciscan centre

Assisi repays an early start — the basilica is busiest with pilgrimage groups mid-morning. Above the town, the Rocca Maggiore gives the view over the plain that explains the site. Nearby, the hermitage of the Eremo delle Carceri in the woods on Monte Subasio is the quieter half of the same story.

Perugia

The regional capital and a university city, which gives it a younger character than the hill towns. The Corso Vannucci runs between the Palazzo dei Priori — holding the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria — and the Etruscan Arch. Perugia is built in layers: an entire medieval street survives underground within the Rocca Paolina.

The southern towns

Orvieto sits on a plug of volcanic tufa above the plain, with a cathedral worth the trip on its own and a network of Etruscan caves beneath it. Todi and Spoleto are within easy reach; Spoleto's Ponte delle Torri, a 13th-century aqueduct bridge 80 m above a gorge, is the image most people carry away.

The mountains and the east

Norcia and the Monti Sibillini are the wildest part of the region. The Piano Grande at Castelluccio flowers in late spring in a way that draws people from across Italy. Norcia was severely damaged by the 2016 earthquakes and is still rebuilding; visiting supports that directly.

Wine country

Montefalco and Bevagna sit among the Sagrantino vineyards, half an hour from Assisi and an easy afternoon.

Umbria is the one Italian region with no coastline and no border with another country, and its character follows from that: everything here faced inward, was built uphill, and stayed put. Its four destinations are all hill towns, and each keeps a different layer of that history in daily use.

Etruscan foundations still standing

Perugia and Orvieto were both Etruscan before they were Roman. Perugia’s Arco Etrusco is a third-century-BC gate that traffic still passes under, with a Roman inscription and a Renaissance loggia added on top — three periods in one structure, none of them retired. Orvieto sits on a plug of volcanic tufa that the Etruscans hollowed out for wells, cellars and tombs; a good part of the town is underneath it rather than on it.

Religion as an occupation, not a monument

Assisi is a working pilgrimage town. Friars live in the basilica complex, the Franciscan order administers itself from here, and the people arriving in numbered coach groups are mostly there for the reason the place exists. That makes it busy without making it staged.

Fortification you walk through

Perugia’s Rocca Paolina was built by a pope in the 1540s to punish the city, on top of an entire quarter that was buried rather than demolished. The streets and house fronts are still down there, and escalators now run through them as an ordinary route into the centre. It is the strangest commute in Italy and locals use it without comment.

An interior that still farms

Spoleto sits where the hills meet the Valle Umbra, below a fortress and a fourteenth-century aqueduct bridge across the gorge. The land around all four towns produces olive oil, lentils, truffles and Sagrantino, and the terraces and groves are worked ground rather than scenery.

Umbria's visitor pressure is narrow — a handful of sites and a handful of weeks — and its more serious issues are structural.

Earthquake recovery

Central Italy was struck by major earthquakes in 1997 and again in 2016. Norcia lost most of its historic centre in 2016, including the basilica, and reconstruction is still under way. Smaller villages across the Valnerina remain partly depopulated. Visiting and spending in these places is materially useful, and worth doing with awareness that some sites remain closed or scaffolded.

Assisi

The basilica receives several million visitors a year, many in organised groups concentrated between 10am and noon. Going early or late changes the experience entirely. It remains an active religious site: silence is requested inside, and photography is not permitted in the Upper and Lower Churches.

Castelluccio in flower

The fioritura on the Piano Grande, roughly late May to early July, now draws heavy traffic onto a single mountain road. A shuttle operates in peak weeks, and walking or cycling the last stretch avoids adding to it. The flowers grow among working lentil fields — staying on paths is a farming matter, not just a conservation one.

Truffles and lentils

Norcia's black truffle and Castelluccio's lentils are both small-scale products with protected status and cheaper imitations on sale nearby. Buying in the towns themselves keeps the value where the work is, and both are part of the earthquake recovery.

Water

The Marmore Falls are released on a schedule because the water is used for hydroelectric power — the falls themselves are Roman engineering, cut in 271 BC. Check the release times rather than arriving to find a dry cliff.

Umbria is a shoulder-season region: its best months are the ones either side of the Italian summer.

• April-June. The strongest window. Green hills, comfortable temperatures, the hill towns uncrowded, and from late May the Castelluccio flowering. Assisi is busy around Easter and Calendimaggio in early May.
• July-August. Hot, frequently above 32 °C, and the inland valleys hold the heat. Hill towns are more bearable than the plain. This is festival season: the Festival dei Due Mondi at Spoleto in late June and early July, and Umbria Jazz in Perugia in July, both of which fill accommodation across the region.
• September-October. Arguably the best of all. Harvest in the vineyards and olive groves, the heat gone, and the light at its most flattering. Black truffle season begins in autumn, and the new olive oil arrives in November.
• November-March. Cool, damp and often foggy in the valleys, with snow in the Sibillini. The towns are at their emptiest and cheapest, and this is when the food is best — truffle, game, new oil. Gubbio lights what it claims is the world's largest Christmas tree on the hillside above the town.

Year-round relative cost index vs region average