Perugia

Top things to do in Perugia

1. 01

   Piazza IV Novembre and the Fontana Maggiore - the medieval heart of the city

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   The fountain in the middle of the square was cut by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano at the end of the 1270s and fed by an aqueduct dragged up the hill from Monte Pacciano, a piece of civic engineering the commune treated as proof it had arrived. Two stacked basins of pink and white stone carry close to fifty carved panels - the labours of the months, the zodiac, biblical scenes, the liberal arts, a fable or two - and the square is closed on one side by the flank of the cathedral and on the other by the town hall. The cathedral steps are the city's living room, and people sit on them from late afternoon until long after dark.

2. 02

   Palazzo dei Priori and the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria - Umbrian painting at home

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The town hall is a fortress of a building with a fan-shaped staircase spilling into the square and bronze copies of the city's griffin and the Guelph lion hung over the doorway. Upstairs the national gallery of Umbria runs chronologically through the region's own art: gold-ground panels by Duccio and Gentile da Fabriano, a Piero della Francesca polyptych, Beato Angelico, and whole rooms of Perugino and Pinturicchio painted for churches a short walk from the door. The frescoed Sala dei Notari, reached off the outside staircase, is usually open to walk into on the way past.

3. 03

   Collegio del Cambio - Perugino's frescoed exchange hall

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The money-changers' guild had its audience hall painted by Perugino at the very end of the fifteenth century and it has barely been touched since: prophets and sibyls along one wall, cardinal virtues with classical heroes beneath them, a Transfiguration and a Nativity, and the painter's own round face staring out of a painted marble frame under an inscription praising him at length. Raphael was in his workshop in these years and which hands did what is still argued over in the room. The merchants' guild hall next door, panelled floor to ceiling in inlaid wood, is part of the same visit.

4. 04

   Rocca Paolina - the buried city inside a papal fortress

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   After Perugia lost a revolt over the papal tax on salt in 1540, the pope had Antonio da Sangallo the Younger raise a fortress on the quarter belonging to the Baglioni, the family that had ruled the city by faction and murder - and rather than clear their streets, houses and towers, the builders sealed them inside the foundations. Perugians pulled the fortress down after unification and planted a garden on top, but the buried quarter survived, and a chain of escalators now runs through it, past vaulted brick streets, doorways and cellars that stay cool in any weather, linking the bus station at the bottom of the hill to the top of the corso.

5. 05

   Corso Vannucci - the passeggiata along the ridge

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   The spine of the old town runs level and traffic-free from the gardens at one end to the main square at the other, lined with palaces, historic cafes and pasticcerie, and named for Pietro Vannucci, the painter everyone calls Perugino. Every evening it fills for the passeggiata, the slow walk up and down that is the actual social life of the city, and in midsummer the corso and the squares off it become the stage for the long-running jazz festival Perugia is known for. The gardens at the southern end look straight out across the valley to Assisi and Monte Subasio.

6. 06

   Cattedrale di San Lorenzo - the duomo that never got its facade

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   The cathedral turns its unfinished flank to the main square, clad in pink and white panels that simply stop partway up because the money and the will ran out. Inside is darker and stranger than the outside suggests, with a Barocci altarpiece and a chapel holding the relic the city calls the Holy Ring, said to be the Virgin's wedding band and carried off from Chiusi in the fifteenth century by a Perugian who considered the theft a civic duty. A seated pope in bronze sits outside on the steps, and an outdoor pulpit built for the open-air sermons of Bernardino of Siena is set into the wall.

7. 07

   Arco Etrusco - the Etruscan gate Augustus put his name on

   history

   The main gate through the Etruscan walls, built of huge travertine blocks in the third century before Christ and still flanked by its two towers. After Octavian took and burned the city, the rebuilt town was renamed and the words Augusta Perusia were cut into the arch, where they remain; a Renaissance loggia and a fountain were added centuries later. It opens onto the square below the palazzo that houses the university for foreigners, so there is almost always a crowd of students on the steps around it.

8. 08

   Pozzo Etrusco - down inside the Etruscan well

   history off beaten path

   A shaft sunk in the third century before Christ under what is now a small palazzo a minute off the main square, wide enough to serve the whole hilltop in a siege and still holding water at the bottom. It is roofed with enormous travertine beams laid across the void, and a walkway takes you down to a footbridge over the water, where the temperature drops and the noise of the street disappears completely.

9. 09

   Basilica di San Pietro - the bell tower and the medieval garden

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   Outside the southern gate stands a tenth-century abbey church whose tall pointed bell tower is the thing you pick Perugia out by from the valley. The nave keeps its ancient columns and is hung wall to wall with paintings, and the carved and inlaid choir stalls behind the altar are among the finest in Italy. The monastery buildings belong to the university's agriculture faculty now, and beside them a reconstructed medieval garden lays out its plants by symbolic meaning as much as by use.

10. 10

    San Domenico and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell'Umbria - the Etruscan record

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    The largest church in Umbria, austere inside after a later rebuilding, with an enormous Gothic window of stained glass behind the altar and the tomb of a pope who died in the city. The convent alongside holds the regional archaeology museum, whose prize is the Cippus of Perugia, a stone slab carrying one of the longest surviving inscriptions in the Etruscan language - a property agreement between two families that scholars are still picking apart.

11. 11

    Tempio di Sant'Angelo - a round church from the fifth century

    history off beaten path

    At the top of the long street running out to the northern gate stands one of the oldest churches in Italy still in use: a circular building of around the fifth century, its drum carried on sixteen mismatched columns lifted from Roman ruins. The walk out to it through the medieval quarter, ending under a tall fortified gatehouse, is half the reason to go.

12. 12

    Torta al testo and Umbrian cooking - the region on a plate

    food

    Umbrian food is plainer, older and more carnivorous than Tuscany's: torta al testo, an unleavened flatbread cooked on a hot disc and split open around prosciutto, sausage and bitter greens; hand-rolled strangozzi under tomato or shaved black truffle from the Valnerina; lentils from the high plain at Castelluccio; porchetta and wild boar. Drink Grechetto from around the lake or the dense, tannic Sagrantino grown just down the valley. The covered market below the main square and the small food shops off the corso are where to buy the parts of it you can carry home.

13. 13

    Casa del Cioccolato Perugina - the home of Baci

    food shopping

    Perugia has made chocolate industrially since the early twentieth century, and the factory out at San Sisto runs a museum and a viewing gallery over the line where Baci, hazelnut chocolates wrapped around a folded love note, come off by the million. It is a short bus ride from the centre and wants booking ahead. The city also throws itself a chocolate festival each autumn that takes over the entire historic centre.

Getting to & around Perugia

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