Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.
Every morning at Lake Trasimeno started with coffee in front of a photograph. The house we rented in San Savino was built around one floor-to-ceiling window facing the water, and on the wall beside it hung a picture the owner’s father had taken decades ago: a fisherman alone in his boat, working the lake. I thought it was a good photograph and nothing more. Then we walked up to the little castle, one street bent into a circle, with a huge red cat called Leone asleep on its only bench, and looked down from the edge. Two small boats were fishing inside the reeds below us, moving so little they could have been painted there. The photograph was fifty years old. It could have been taken that afternoon.
That afternoon is Umbria. It is the only region in the middle of Italy with no coastline: no sea, no Renaissance, no big capital, and every neighbor outranks it in the tourist imagination. Tuscany has the art, Lazio has Rome, and the Marche has spent the last few years being everybody’s newly discovered beach. Umbria has forest over almost half of its land, steep valleys, and stone towns on hilltops that nobody outside Italy could place on a map. For centuries it had little to sell the rest of the peninsula except its men, and Umbrian mercenaries fought for Florence, Bologna and the Popes, then came home and ruled their own towns with the same swords.
The Tiber runs straight down the middle of it, and long before Rome the river was a border. The Etruscans lived on the west bank. The Umbrians lived on the east bank, a people who left almost nothing behind except seven bronze tablets in Gubbio. Rome swallowed both. This Guide follows that old line, because you can still feel it: the lake, Perugia and Orvieto on one side, Gubbio, Assisi and the valley towns on the other.
I came in two halves. The south first, on trips to Todi, where a Hungarian writer friend lives and where I watched Italy win the Euro final on the main square. The north this April, from that house on the lake.
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In a nutshell aka TLDR
This is not Tuscany, and the towns are alive. The Tuscan countryside is planned and built: the tree lines, the organized roads. Umbria’s is tended but raw, with valleys so small that from the walls of one town you can see the next. And unlike the medieval villages of Lazio, which turn into ghost towns after eight in the evening, Umbrian towns still have young people on the main square, shops for locals, and people living inside the old walls.
After ten hill towns, you have seen the formula. A main square with a church, narrow streets climbing up to it from four directions, a cat, an old couple, good wine with a plate of cold cuts. Umbria is the best place in Italy to taste them rather than study them: three to five towns in a day, an hour or two each. That is what the Umbrian Circle is for.
Bring a car and good knees. Almost every town comes in two layers, an upper and a lower, and you park in the lower one and climb. Perugia needs escalators and its own small automated metro to get you up. The roads between towns are very good, and half of the Circle runs on main roads or even the A1.
There is exactly one crowd. Assisi. Everything else, including a town with a nine-hundred-year-old festival on the regional flag, is largely unknown to international tourism. Give Assisi an afternoon, then eat and sleep somewhere else.
Everything is close. The lake is thirty minutes from Perugia and about an hour from Siena or Florence. Assisi is a day trip from Perugia. Gubbio is an hour north, the one detour worth the hour. Starting from Perugia, the whole Circle fits in a day.
The easy win: a week on Lake Trasimeno. It’s where we slept, and where I would send anyone spending more than a few days in the middle of Italy.
Where to base yourself
Lake Trasimeno. We spent two weeks here, one full week just around the lake. It is the base for anyone doing weeks in central Italy: southern Tuscany, the hills of Umbria and the north of Lazio are all within a couple of hours, Siena and Arezzo are close, and Perugia is half an hour away. It is quiet in a way I thought existed only in the mountains, and there are almost no hotels. The shore belongs to campsites, glamping and private houses.
Lago Trasimeno | Never Compete with the Sea
Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.
Or Perugia, if you want the opposite. If you are young, or you like the buzz of a city, book a hotel inside the citadel, the old upper town. You skip the parking, the escalators and the long walk down at night.
If you are doing the Circle from Rome or Florence, sleep halfway. Amelia is the obvious choice.
The places not to miss
West of the Tiber: the Etruscan side
Lake Trasimeno and its three towns. Almost the size of Lake Como, seven meters deep at best, with no palaces, no jet skis, no ferries except to the islands, and no tall hotels. Like almost every lake I know, it has three towns: Magione is the working town, Castiglione del Lago is the postcard fortress on a rock, with a few streets of cafés inside the walls, and Passignano is the one with the lakeside promenade and the restaurants. One warning: the lake is shrinking. This summer the ferry to Isola Polvese stopped running because the hulls started touching the bottom. If you want to see the boats in the reeds, don’t wait a decade.
Perugia. Umbria’s capital is two towns stacked on a hill: the lower town, where people live, and the citadel on top, the old Etruscan city, where everything else happens. Two universities (one founded in 1308, one for foreigners), the regional government, Umbria Jazz every July, the Eurochocolate festival, and a student nightlife famous across Italy. Getting up is the first challenge: park in a garage below and take the escalators, the elevators or the Minimetro. Getting down is the second. Some of them stop at nine or ten at night, GPS doesn’t know which streets close, and we ended up asking locals for an open pedestrian lane and walking down like donkeys. Once you’re up, do what the locals do: a crawl from square to square. An espresso, a sandwich, a beer, a look over the edge of the walls, and repeat until everything closes.
Orvieto and the southwest. Orvieto sits right by the highway, walled on its rock, with a large and beautiful cathedral, but the reason to stop is lunch or dinner: the best restaurants on the Circle and a busy old town. Around it are Montecchio, with an Etruscan necropolis and good olive oil; Città della Pieve, the red town built from local terracotta brick; Panicale and Paciano, two small walled towns above the lake with the best views of it; and Allerona, a stone village that has barely changed since the Middle Ages.
The Umbrian Circle | Town Tasting in a Day
Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.
East of the Tiber: the Umbrian side
The river was the border, and this bank stayed Umbrian. The only Etruscan town ever built on this side is Bettona, today a small walled town that is worth the detour.
Gubbio. The best example of what this publication is for. It’s an hour’s drive north of Perugia, facing the Marche more than the rest of Umbria, and so far off the usual routes that it has kept everything to itself. Think of Assisi without the theme park. Every 15 May the town runs the Festa dei Ceri, three wooden towers carried at a run up the mountain to the basilica of its patron, Saint Ubaldo, who wins every year; those three towers are the red shapes on Umbria’s flag. Gubbio is also where Antal Szerb set part of Journey by Moonlight, where a gorge outside the walls gave science the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and where seven bronze tablets hold almost all that is left of the Umbrian language.
Assisi. The one Umbrian town everyone can name, and the one exception to the rule. Parking was easy on an April weekday, and the basilica of Saint Francis is grand, best of all from the valley road. The streets between the two basilicas are where the town loses me: racks of molded plastic in the shape of the poorest man in European history, at a discount. Then walk ten minutes downhill, out of the walls, to San Damiano, the small, plain church where Francis heard the voice. When we were there, maybe a dozen people were inside. Give Assisi three to five hours, and eat and sleep in Perugia or the valley towns.
Todi. The border town. Its Etruscan name is usually read as “border”, and it sits on the east bank, looking across at what used to be Etruria. An American sculptor, Beverly Pepper, moved here in the seventies; artists followed, then Americans, and the town became known as the Beverly Hills of Umbria. It has no big sight, apart from one Renaissance church outside the walls. What it has is the reason people move here: a working, living, handsome hill town in neat shape, with teenagers flirting on the walls after dark and locals still living in the old center. It sits on a clay hill full of Roman tunnels and cisterns, slowly slipping, so park below where the weekend markets are and walk up. Order the wood pigeon.
The south and the valley. The lower half of the Circle. Spoleto, once the seat of a Lombard duchy that ruled much of central Italy, has a steep and rewarding old town. Amelia is ringed by enormous pre-Roman walls, with Roman cisterns under its main square and parking right at the gate. Narni is a hard climb to its main square, and its Latin name gave C. S. Lewis his Narnia; stay for dinner and order the truffle pasta. Terni is the city of steel and of Saint Valentine: stay inside its small center or skip it. Then comes the valley toward Assisi. Montefalco is the balcony of Umbria, best with a glass of Sagrantino on the walls; Trevi is for olive oil; Foligno is the flat and easy odd one out; and Campello sul Clitunno has the Tempietto, a tiny early medieval temple on the UNESCO list, right by the road.
Tuscia’s food
Umbria eats the forest: wild boar ragù, chestnuts, mushrooms, big hearty stews, and the two sandwiches the region runs on, torta al testo (a flatbread filled with pork or wild boar) and porchetta.
The lake. At Trasimeno there is one menu, not separate ones for fish and meat, so grilled perch sits next to wild boar stew. Order the carpa regina in porchetta, a carp stuffed with lard, garlic and fennel and roasted until the skin goes crisp; the tegamaccio, a stew of lake fish; and the fried eels sold in paper cups on the promenade.
Truffles. Narni and Scheggino are in truffle country: truffle pasta in the first, a giant truffle frittata in the second.
Wood pigeon in Todi. Spit-roasted and served in a sauce of its own drippings, red wine, the innards and olives. Gamey, very local, best with a heavy Umbrian red.
Wine and oil. Sagrantino in Montefalco, Torgiano’s protected wines, olive oil from Trevi.
Chocolate. Perugia’s Baci were invented in 1922 by Luisa Spagnoli, out of leftover hazelnuts and cacao. The brand belongs to Nestlé now. The Eurochocolate festival is still Perugia’s.
The neighbors
For most people Umbria is the middle of a longer journey. Arezzo and Siena are an hour from the lake.
For most people Umbria is the middle of a longer journey. Arezzo and Siena are an hour from the lake.
From Rome, the natural way in is through Tuscia, the way I first came.
From Florence, the Tuscan half of the drive has its own Guide.
The final note
This guide is alive. I update it whenever a new piece on Umbria goes up.
Everything in here is a place I have been to personally. I don’t write about restaurants I haven’t eaten at or towns I haven’t walked through. If a place is in this guide, it’s because I went, ate, learned something, and decided it was worth your time. Umbria is where I learned that the empty church is usually the right one. The basilica upstairs had the crowds. San Damiano, where the whole story began, had a dozen people in it.
Guide last updated: 3 November 2026
