Three days in Perugia: a pope buried a whole neighbourhood and the city walks through it

Two nights on the hill, with escalators running through the streets of a demolished quarter, an Umbrian picture gallery upstairs, and Assisi twenty minutes down the valley.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Perugia
Places
8 across 3 days
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In 1540 Perugia refused to pay a papal salt tax, lost the war that followed, and was punished in a way nobody forgets. Paul III had an entire quarter of the city knocked down, including the towers and palaces of the family who had run the place, and built a fortress on top of the rubble with the old streets still standing underneath it as foundations.

The fortress was pulled down when Italy was unified, but the buried streets are still there, and the city has run escalators through them. You come up from the bus station and walk through a sixteenth century vault, past a medieval doorway and up a lane with no sky, and arrive in the main square. It is the strangest arrival in any Italian city.

Above ground Perugia is a compact Etruscan and medieval hill town with a university full of foreign students, a serious picture collection, and Assisi visible across the valley. Two nights covers it with a day out.

Highlights

  • Escalators running through the underground streets of a quarter demolished in 1540
  • A fountain carved in the 1270s with the months of the year, Aesop's fables and a griffin
  • Giotto's life of Saint Francis, on the walls of the church built over his tomb
  • An Etruscan well thirty-seven metres deep that has been supplying water since the third century BC

Where to stay

Perugia, two nights

An Etruscan city before it was a Roman one, on a high spur with valleys on three sides, which is why the plan makes no sense and the views are constant. Five medieval streets run down from the centre along the ridges like the fingers of a hand.

It spent the Middle Ages fighting itself and its neighbours, was absorbed by the papacy in the sixteenth century, and now has two universities and a large population of students, so it is livelier in term time than a town of this size has any right to be.

Day by day

Day 1 in Perugia

Up through the buried city, and the fountain

Arrive through the fortress if you possibly can. The escalators start in a car park below the town and climb through the vaults Sangallo built, which are the old streets with their doorways, arches and stairs still in place, roofed over and lit. It takes about five minutes and you emerge on a terrace at the top of the town.

The main street runs from there to the main square, which has a cathedral on one side, a Gothic palace on the other, and a fountain in the middle carved in the 1270s by Nicola Pisano and his son: two basins of panels showing the months, the signs of the zodiac, scenes from Aesop, and the city's griffin.

The cathedral is odd in that it presents its rough side wall to the square rather than its front, because the front faces a smaller street that mattered less. Perugia is full of that sort of thing.

  1. 15:30

    Rocca Paolina

    Historic

    Free, always open, and the best thing in the city. Go slowly and look sideways: the vaulting was built straight onto the tops of the demolished houses, so you are walking down a covered medieval street.

  2. 17:00

    Fontana Maggiore

    Other

    Twenty-five carved panels on the lower basin and twenty-four figures above, all still legible after seven and a half centuries. Water reached it by an aqueduct built across the valley, which you can still walk along as a raised footpath.

  3. 18:15

    Perugia Cathedral

    Religious

    Plain and huge, entered from the side. It holds what the church says is the Virgin's wedding ring, kept in a reliquary behind fifteen locks and shown a handful of times a year.

  4. 20:00

    Torta al testo and a Sagrantino

    Eat

    The flatbread sandwich from a counter, or a proper dinner in one of the small places off the main street, where a set menu with wine still comes in at under twenty euros.

With more time: The steps of the cathedral are where the whole student population sits in the evening, which is worth an hour with a beer. On the far side of the square the Gothic palace has a guild hall off the entrance frescoed by Perugino, which takes fifteen minutes and is easy to walk past.

Day 2 in Perugia

Assisi, across the valley

Assisi is twenty minutes away and visible from Perugia on a clear day, a white town strung along the side of a mountain. It receives an enormous number of visitors and it absorbs them better than you would expect, because the crowds are concentrated in one building and the rest of the town is steep and quiet.

That building is the double basilica put up over Francis's tomb within two years of his death. The lower church is dark and low and holds the tomb itself; the upper church is tall and light and covered with a cycle of his life in twenty-eight scenes, painted around 1300 and among the most influential paintings in European art. Part of the vault came down in an earthquake in 1997 and was reassembled from tens of thousands of fragments.

After that, walk uphill. The cathedral where both Francis and Clare were baptised is halfway up, and the castle on the top has the whole Umbrian plain behind it.

  1. 10:00

    Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi

    Religious

    Free, and no photography, and quiet is enforced. Go to the lower church first for the tomb and the Cimabue and Lorenzetti frescoes, then up to the Giotto cycle in the light. Two hours if you take it slowly.

  2. 12:30

    Lunch in the upper town

    Eat

    Walk five minutes uphill from the basilica and the prices fall by a third. Umbrian pork, lentils from Castelluccio, and a glass of something local.

  3. 14:00

    San Rufino Cathedral

    Religious

    The cathedral, up in the town rather than down by the basilica, with a Romanesque front of carved animals. Francis and Clare were both baptised at the font inside, which is still there.

  4. 15:15

    Rocca Maggiore

    Historic

    The castle above the town, a steep fifteen minutes up from the cathedral, with a walkway along the wall to a separate tower. The view down over the roofs and out across the plain is the best in Umbria.

With more time: The hermitage in the woods above Assisi, where Francis and his companions went to be alone, is four kilometres up the mountain and reachable on foot in about an hour or by taxi. It is small, free, run by friars, and by some distance the most affecting place connected with him.

Day 3 in Perugia

The gallery, the well, and going

The last morning is on the main square. Upstairs in the Gothic palace is the national gallery of Umbria, which follows the local school from gold-ground panels through to Perugino, who ran the biggest workshop in Italy here and taught Raphael. There is a Piero della Francesca and a Fra Angelico as well, and almost never a queue.

Then, five minutes away, the Etruscan well: a shaft nearly forty metres deep, cut in the third century BC and roofed with two enormous stone beams, with a walkway that takes you down to a bridge over the water. It is damp, cold, and a very good demonstration of what these people could do.

The minimetro back down to the station takes ten minutes.

  1. 09:30

    Palazzo dei Priori

    Historic

    The gallery occupies the top floors and is arranged chronologically, so start at the beginning and stop when you have had enough. The Perugino rooms are the point, and the building itself, with its vaulted council chamber, is worth the ticket.

  2. 11:45

    Etruscan Well

    Visit

    Reached through a courtyard off a side street and easy to miss. Steep stairs, low light and a stone lintel spanning the shaft that nobody has fully explained the lifting of.

  3. 12:45

    Last lunch, then the minimetro

    Eat

    Something with truffle if it is the season, otherwise a plate of Norcia ham. Then the driverless train down the hill to the station.

With more time: If you have another hour, the Etruscan gate at the bottom of the main street is a third century BC arch reset into the fortress wall, and the chapel a few streets north holds the only fresco by Raphael still in the city, painted when he was about twenty.

Before you go

Where to stay

In the historic centre along or just off the main street, which runs the length of the ridge and is where everything happens. It is compact, closed to traffic, and about four hundred metres from end to end.

Perugia is a hill town in the full sense: whatever is on the map as a short walk may involve a hundred steps. The city compensates with a network of public escalators and lifts, which are free and worth learning. Anything down by the station is convenient for arriving and a long way from the evening.

Getting there and around

The station is at the bottom of the hill, and the small driverless minimetro runs up from near it to the edge of the old town in about ten minutes. The alternative is the bus to Piazza Partigiani and then the escalators up through the fortress, which is more fun.

Assisi is twenty-five minutes by train, and its station is four kilometres below the town with a shuttle bus up. Buses from Perugia go into the town itself and are the easier option. Florence and Rome are both about two hours away, which makes Perugia a good stop between them.

Tickets and timing

Nothing needs booking. The picture gallery, the Etruscan well and the fortress are all cheap and rarely busy, and a combined city ticket covers several of them.

Two dates change the town completely. The jazz festival in July fills every room and puts stages in the squares, and the chocolate festival in autumn does the same with far more people per square metre. Both are excellent and neither is a quiet weekend.

Eating

Umbrian food is pork, lentils, and whatever comes out of the woods. Torta al testo, a flat bread cooked on a stone and split to hold ham and greens, is the local sandwich and costs almost nothing. Cured meats from Norcia are the best in Italy. In autumn, black truffle goes on everything and is priced accordingly.

The wine is Sagrantino from Montefalco, dark and tannic and worth the small extra, or the everyday Grechetto if you want white. And the town makes chocolate industrially: the factory on the edge of the city has a museum and a tasting, and the sugar-coated hazelnut ones with the printed love notes inside came from here.

The thing that stays with people here is the layering. You go down an escalator and pass through a street that was buried in the 1540s, come out into a square built in the 1290s, and drink a coffee under a fountain carved before that.

None of it is arranged for visitors, and all of it is free to walk through.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Perugia or Assisi as a base?
Perugia. It is a real city with restaurants that stay open and a life beyond the visitors, and Assisi is twenty minutes away. Assisi in the evening, once the coaches have gone, is beautiful and very quiet, which some people want and most do not for two nights.
Is two nights enough for Umbria?
For Perugia and Assisi, yes. Umbria itself deserves more: Spoleto, Orvieto, Gubbio and the Sibillini mountains are all within an hour or two, and almost all of it needs a car. Two nights here is the town-based version.
How much walking is involved?
A lot of it vertical. Perugia is a ridge with streets falling away on both sides and Assisi is built on a slope. Both have escalators and lifts in useful places, but you should expect steps and wear shoes that grip on worn stone.
Is the chocolate factory worth it?
With children, yes. It is on an industrial estate outside the city with a bus connection, and it is a museum, a viewing gallery over the production line and a generous tasting. Book ahead in season; it sells out.
When should I come?
May, June, September and October. July brings the jazz festival, which is a good reason to come and a bad time to want a quiet room. Winter is cold and clear on the hill and almost empty, and the gallery is a pleasure with nobody in it.