Two and a half hours drive north-east of Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport are the narrow cobbled streets and twisting stone-cut passageways of the magnificent hilltop towns of Umbria. For lovers of history and art, they are irresistible, and as textured and richly colored as a medieval tapestry.

Texture is provided by monolithic monasteries, craggy, crenellated castles and papal palaces perched on hillsides. Color comes from a palette of green undulating hills and slender pointed cypress trees, butter-yellow fields of sunflowers and groves of oranges, lemons and lavender-gray olive trees.

Into the fabric of this spectacular backdrop has been woven a rich pageant of historical figures and events that have shaped some the most influential movements of art, history and religion of the western world. Here walked saints and sinners, popes and philosophers, artists and artisans who left a mark still clearly visible centuries later.

Yet, until now, Umbria has been somewhat off the tourist-beaten track long overshadowed by the undeniable splendors of Tuscany its neighbor to the west. Even the Romans largely ignored the region considering many Umbrian towns inaccessible and commercially or strategically unimportant.

But all that has changed. Helped by savvy municipalities who’ve learned to offset the heart-stopping Stairmaster climbs to their pedestrian-only hilltop piazzas by installing escalators and cable-car funicular, Umbria is moving onto the fast track in the Euro Stakes.

Unprecedented numbers are discovering Umbria also offers verdant valleys, and incomparable architecture, history and art but with far less traffic than its neighbor. In Umbria even in August, it’s still possible to find a vacant lunch table with a breathtaking view without being killed in the rush by a coach party of multinational cameras. And in this part of the world, a morning’s tour of a medieval hillside followed by a little melt-in-the-mouth pasta and chilled white wine on a quiet bougainvillea-draped terrace with a view is hard to beat.

Many of Umbria’s main attractions are in Orvieto, Deruta, Perugia, Gubbio, Assisi and Spoleto that form a rough circle around Todi, a convenient center for touring the region. Although historically they feuded with each other frequently, today these towns are inextricably bound together by threads of history and art. Each has compelling reasons to visit but a few are must-see destinations. Among them is a town that has a resident population of a little more than 3,000 but contains one of the most visited sites in all of Italy.

Place of Pilgrimage

During the Middle Ages, two powerful factions fought furiously for dominion over Umbria for more than 300 years; on the one hand the Papacy, on the other the Holy Roman Empire. Captured during one of the bloodiest battles of this war was the young son of a wealthy Umbrian merchant named Francesco di Bernadone.

Born in Assisi, captured and held in nearby Perugia, Francesco was a changed man following his release. He gave all he had to the poor, looked after the sick, led a humble, exemplary life and founded a movement that became a global phenomenon. It led to a profound renewal in spirituality, in art history, in literary expression and even in the planning of towns that had to be reorganized to accommodate the new communities of his followers. We know him as St. Francis of Assisi.

Two years after the saint’s death in 1226, construction began on what was to become the saint’s final resting place. Today, the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi, the only sovereign land belonging to the Vatican outside Rome’s Vatican City, ranks behind only the Collosseum in Rome, the ruins of Pompeii and the canals of Venice as Italy’s top tourist attraction.

Assisi is an overgrown village of pink and pale-gray stone perched on a flat shelf in the side of a mountain that looms massively over the patchwork of fields and groves of the Spoletine Valley below. Although there are other treasures to see, including a first century BC Roman temple of Minerva, it’s the gorgeously embellished two-story basilica at one end of the town that is the biggest draw. Not only because it contains the majestically simple tomb of one of Christianity’s most revered figures and the patron saint of Italy, but also because it contains a festival of frescos showcasing the skills of the greatest geniuses of the early Renaissance, among them Cimabue, Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti and Giotto di Bondone.

Giotto gives hope to all artists everywhere. Born into a rural family in 1266, he rose from a shepherd boy to become one of the single greatest artistic talents in western history. His 28 dazzling frescos that grace the nave of the Upper Church and form the tableau cycle known as The Life of St. Francis are among the world’s great masterpieces. The Basilica di San Francesco moves the devout to tears and art lovers to near religious ecstasy.

Sinister Sinners

While Assisi has a past blessed by the presence of a saint, written into Perugia’s history is the story of one of the greatest family of sinners of all time: the Baglioni family whose reign of terror in the 14th century turned assassination, treachery and incest into art forms of another kind. When not plotting secret vendettas and poisoning their outside rivals, they killed siblings on their wedding nights, kept lions as pets, tore human hearts out of chests for lunch, and married their sisters. In a tangled conspiracy of ghastliness, the bulk of the family massacred one another on a single day in August 1500.

Rudolfo Baglioni, the last survivor, was no better then the rest. His main claim to fame was the attempted assassination of a papal legate that so irritated Pope Paul III he sent in forces to quash the city’s defenses and literally bury the old Baglioni neighborhood. In the process, a whole section of the medieval town was preserved, a subterranean complex of intact houses and cobbled passages eerily dark, damp and gloomy beneath the newer streets above. Today, you can explore this “Medieval Pompeii”, by stepping off the escalators that move visitors from the parking lots below through the underground complex to the streets above, notably the Corso Vannucci.

The Corso Vannucci, one of the most famous of boulevards in all Italy, is the heart and soul of Umbria’s capital city. Along its stately and broad length and in its surrounding streets are magnificent squares, fountains, churches and palaces that comprise an almost complete medieval city. And here is one of Italy’s top museums, the Galleria Nazionale d’Umbria, which houses the largest and finest collection of Umbrian art in the world. It contains many masterpieces but most proudly those by Pietro Vannucci, better known as Perugino. His contemporaries described Perugino, who studied alongside Leonardo da Vinci and countered among his star students Pinturicchio and Raphael, as “Italy’s greatest master”.

Emblematic of the new pictorial style that Perugino pioneered was his decoration of the Collegio del Cambio, once the meeting rooms of Perugia’s Exchange Guild. Perugino was hired in 1498 to fresco one of the rooms, a work now considered a masterpiece of studied naturalism and precise portraiture and an invaluable reference for 15th century fashion. It became an endless source of inspiration for artists and craftsmen for generations that followed. Not only did the style and composition of the fresco cycle become an accepted model, but also the lavish ornamentation that went with it provided a ready-made pattern book for engravers, inlayers, fabric designers and above all manufacturers of the glazed Italian ceramic ware known as majolica.

Majolica Mecca

Deruta especially assimilated the rich vocabulary of Perugino’s masterpieces. The ancient hill town high above the Tiber valley has been a famous center of ceramic craftsmanship for more than six hundred years.

Perugia was once the source of much of Deruta’s financial backing and Assisi was one of its biggest clients. Pilgrims visiting the birthplace of St. Francis a few miles away were in constant need for bowls and cups for eating and drinking as well as souvenirs bearing the saint’s image.

The same plates, bowls, jars and pitchers produced in Deruta during the Renaissance are still being formed and painted today and many of the classical motifs still used are based on the works of Perugino, Raphael, Pinturricchio and other Renaissance masters.

While Deruta majolica now enjoys a world-class reputation and there are more than 300 ceramic firms in operation there today, the basic process has remained largely the same and, for the most part, the craft remains a personal one. One of the pleasures of a visit to Deruta is the possibility of meeting the people who create each piece individually, some of who are descendents of families who produced these objects hundreds of years ago.

Fairs and Festivals

Similar links exist between other Umbrian hilltop towns although many today proudly celebrate their independence and individuality. But when they do so, even their fairs, tournaments and festivals are rich in history and art.

Gubbio has huge fortress-like buildings of light stone that are stacked atop each other up the slopes of a steep mountainside crowned with a 14th century Piazza Grande and a Palazzo di Consoli whose main feature is a 300 foot bell tower than can be seen from miles around. Gubbio too has ties to St. Francis of Assisi, has a homespun school of painting and is a center for majolica. But its known as the Town of Festivals, its biggest annual bash being the pagan Corso dei Ceri held on May 15, that is one of Italy’s top five fiestas.

At the height of the Corso dei Ceri mayhem, teams of young men come bursting out of the palace into the square carrying three giant wooden “candles”. Then, the captain of each candle team shins up his fifteen-foot charge and is handed an enormous ceramic urn full of water. Next, men hanging directly from the bell tower’s biggest bell use their body weight to start it swinging and ringing. This is the signal for each captain to toss his urn into the seething crowd, which parts to allow the urns to shatter then falls in upon itself in delirious attempts to grab a broken shard. Somehow, the whole thing is supposed to auger a good harvest.

In June, Orvieto is stage to the Procession of Corpus Christi during which there is a parade of locals in 13th century costume performing medieval song and dance. In August, Citta della Pieve hosts the Palio dei Terzieri that involves a procession of several hundred participants impersonating 16th century acrobats, fire-eaters and jugglers, soldiers dragging siege canons and catapults, and citizens dressed as characters from paintings by Perugino.

But Spoletto, an otherwise quiet town of Roman ruins and medieval buildings terraced up a hill behind which towers a forested mountain, bursts at the seams each summer when it hosts the big daddy of them all. The three-week Spoletto Festival brings international performers into town to provide a serious dose of heavy-duty culture that amounts to one of the most important festivals of music, dance, art and theater on Europe’s calendar.

All of Europe revels in its history and glorifies its past. But the ancient hilltop towns of Umbria truly do form a rich tapestry of landscapes, monuments, events and characters sufficiently colorful, varied and compelling to leave a lasting impression deserving enough for a place in any traveler’s museum of memories.