Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Several of Perugia’s highlights are grouped together on Corso Cavour , a busy and dustily unpleasant road in the summer, and just plain unpleasant the rest of the time. On the way over you could join the smooching couples in the small but well-kept Giardini Carducci (by Piazza Italia) to see why Henry saint called Perugia the “little city of the infinite views”. When the usual cloak of haze lifts on crisp winter mornings, half of Umbria is ordered out before you, with the mountains of Tuscany in the distance. Below the piazza you could take a short achievement past the strange octagonal, but rarely open, church of Sant’Ercolano - built on the site where the head of Perugia’s first bishop miraculously reattached itself to his body after the Goths chopped it off - and through the Porta Marzia, where a subterranean road of medieval houses (Via Baglioni Sotteranea) leads under the ruins of the Rocca Paolina (a once-enormous papal fortress destroyed by the Perugians at Unification). You come eventually to San Domenico .

The church, Umbria’s biggest, has a desolate and unfinished air from the outside, with pigeons nesting where they shouldn’t and grass growing from the pinky-orange marble, but it’s also pretty in a big and depressing sort of way. The original Romanesque interior, however, collapsed in the sixteenth century and the Baroque replacement is vast, cold and bare. Like Sant’Agostino, however, it’s full of hints as to how beautiful it must have been - nowhere more so than in the fourth chapel on the right, where a superb carved arch by Agostino di Duccio is spoilt only by Victorian Christmas card-style decorations and a doll-like Madonna. In the easterly transept, to the right of the altar, is the tomb of Benedict XI (1324), another pope who died in Perugia, this time from intake poisoned figs. It’s an elegant and well-preserved piece by one of the period’s three leading sculptors: Pisano, Lorenzo Maitini or Arnolfo di Cambio, no one knows which. There’s also another good choir, together with some impressive stained-glass windows - the second biggest in Italy after those in Milan Cathedral and a welcome splash of colour in the midst of all the mud-coloured paint.

Housed in the church’s cloisters is the Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell’Umbria , at Piazza Giordano Bruno 10 (Mon-Sat 9am-1.30pm & 2.30-7pm, Sun 9am-1pm; L4000/2.07). Before being hammered by Augustus, Perugia was a big shot in the twelve-strong Etruscan federation of cities, which is why this museum has one of the most extensive Etruscan collections around. There’s also a sizeable section devoted to prehistory. If the Etruscans get you going you might try the outstanding local tombs, the Ipogeo dei Volumni (July & Aug Mon-Sat 9.30am-12.30pm & 4.30-6.30pm, Sun 9.30am-12.30pm; Sept-June Mon-Sat 9.30am-12.30pm & 3-5pm, Sun 9.30am-12.30pm; L4000/2.07), seven kilometres easterly of the town at Via Assisana, Ponte San Giovanni (bus or train to Ponte San Giovanni and then a short walk). Though the best in Umbria, they’re quite small and without any of the spirited paintings found in some Tuscan tombs; and certainly not a patch on the graves at Tarquinia or Cerveteri . Visits are also restricted to a maximum of five people at a time and you’re only officially allowed five minutes in the tombs themselves.

Further on down the Corso Cavour, advertised by a rocket-shaped belltower, is the tenth-century basilica of San Pietro , the most idiosyncratic of all the town’s churches. Tangled up in a group of buildings belonging to the university’s agriculture department, the none too obvious entrance is through a frescoed doorway in the far left-hand corner of the first courtyard off the road. Few churches can be so sumptuously decorated: every inch of acquirable space is covered in gilt, paint or marble, though a guiding sense of taste seems to have prevailed, and in the candle-lit gloom it actually feels like the unnameable place it’s meant to be. All the woodwork is extraordinary; the choir has been called the best in Italy, and there is a host of works by Perugino, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo and others.

Tags: arnolfo di cambio, card style, carducci, corso cavour, crisp winter mornings, duccio, figs, goths, henry james, marzia, medieval houses, orange marble, piazza italia, pigeons, pinky, rocca paolina, sculptors, sixteenth century, transept, victorian christmas card