ANCIENT MEETS MODERN IN ITALY’S GREEN HEART
A hilly patchwork of yellow and green Umbrian fields unfolded on both sides of the road as I zipped around hairpin turns in my little red Fiat. This being Italy, what I thought was death-defying speed wasn’t fast enough for drivers coming up behind me.
They barely hesitated, passing me on blind curves on the otherwise nearly deserted road. It was a bit unnerving, but over a week, hopping between Umbria’s hill towns, I relaxed my grip on the steering wheel and found that getting there was half the fun.
Umbria is a landlocked agricultural region known as the green heart of Italy. In the village Todi, I took a free funicular to the top of a mini plateau. The smell of wood smoke lured me from the Piazza del Popolo to the literal edge of town, the clifftop Ristorante Umbria, with a view of the sun dropping behind distant mountains.
A cluster of travertine-block buildings just off the piazza looked in the twilight like a medieval theme park, but the town’s winding cobblestone alleys were alive with the sounds of children’s singsong chatter and dinner dishes clattering through a window.
These signs of real life in Umbria’s ancient towns were ever present but never failed to surprise me. In Foligno, couples with baby strollers were well-represented in a crowd at a free concert in the main piazza. In Gualdo Cattaneo, the town’s millennials take over a cylindrical fortress on weekends to run a co-op bar with 360-degree views of the valley. Only in Perugia were locals harder to find, because of a jazz festival drawing thousands of visitors.
The area is sometimes compared to Tuscany, with food and wine as abundant as the vistas, but without the crowds.
Assisi has been a pilgrimage site since St. Francis went into the fields to preach his message of love. He renounced his wealth there 800 years ago in the main Piazza del Commune. I watched the local kids walk through the piazza from the steps of a Roman temple to a statue of the goddess Minerva. The temple’s Corinthian columns have been preserved, but the interior is gilded Baroque, thanks to a 17thcentury renovation that turned the temple into a small church.
A basilica honours Francis on a promontory overlooking the valley. Monks wandered the grounds of an on-site monastery. Inside the church, frescoes tell the story of how Francis rejuvenated the church by focusing on common folk. The message resonated and left me with a sense of peace. I tried holding on to that feeling during the long drive to back to the Rome airport, but I couldn’t help getting a thrill out of one last windy ride.