There’s a running joke in our house — well, it’s more of a running observation — that Umbria has a fierce rivalry with Tuscany, and Tuscany has no idea this rivalry exists. Tuscany is busy being Tuscany: the wine tours and the villa rentals and the cooking classes and the general business of being the most photographed, fantasized-about region in Italy. “Tuscany schmuscany,” I always say.
Meanwhile Umbria, just to the southeast, is sitting here with its extraordinary food and wine and medieval hilltowns and rolling green hills, caught somewhere between being offended that it’s so often overlooked and yet also a little relieved about the slight.
I’ve been living in Umbria since 2009. My husband Paolo was born here — in our tiny village of Allerona, which is our home base and the place I am fairly certain I will never leave. So I have strong opinions about this region. And one of the strongest is that most people who love Italy don’t know nearly enough about it.
Oh, and the photo at the top of this post? That’s Umbria, folks, not Tuscany. Ahem.
So, just what is Umbria?
Umbria is the only landlocked region in central Italy, which matters more than it sounds — no coastline means no beach crowds, no seaside resort towns, no high-season chaos. What it has instead is the Apennine mountains to the east, Lake Trasimeno (the largest lake in central Italy) to the northwest, and in between, some of the most quietly spectacular landscapes in the country. Green hills, ancient oak forests, river valleys, postcard hilltowns, and fertile terrain that’s been continuously inhabited since the early before Rome was Rome.
Given that I’m an archaeology nerd, that last part is particularly fascinating to me. The region takes its name from the Umbri, one of the oldest known peoples of the Italian peninsula, who settled the eastern highlands long before anyone had heard of Romans. To the west, the Etruscans controlled the Tiber valley and built the cities that would eventually become Orvieto, Perugia, and others — leaving behind temples, necropolises, and rich grave goods. The Romans eventually absorbed all of it and kept the things they liked, as Romans tended to do. But you don’t have to look very hard in Umbria to find what came before. It’s in the walls, the street grids, the hilltop positions — the bones of the place are ancient in the most romantic, mysterious of ways.
The medieval period turned Umbria into contested ground — fought over by Lombards, Byzantines, and Franks before the Church established firm control and made it the heart of the Papal States, a relationship that shaped the region’s architecture, politics, and culture for centuries. Much later, the Allied advance through Italy in 1943 and 1944 brought real fighting to Umbrian towns — and sometimes between townspeople themselves. It’s a chapter that tends to get overshadowed by more famous campaigns further south, but one that sticks in the local collective memory.
On a sunnier note, Umbria is also one of the best eating and drinking regions in Italy — which is saying something. It’s truffle country. (And even if I don’t like truffles, I appreciate that others do.). It produces some of Italy’s most respected olive oil (including from the trees in our backyard). Its wines, particularly from the DOC zones around Montefalco and Orvieto, are excellent and still relatively unknown outside Italy, which means the people making them (including our own Peppino) are still primarily small scale producers — and that individual care tends to show up in the product.
A few places worth knowing
Don’t get me wrong. There are many places worth knowing in Umbria. But here are a few names that might sound familiar:
Perugia is the regional capital — a proper university city with a medieval center built on top of an Etruscan one, and a good food and arts scene. Corso Vannucci, the main pedestrian drag, has the kind of evening passeggiata energy that reminds you this is a city where people actually live. It’s worth a day or two and tends to be overlooked, maybe because it’s a working city rather than a stage set.
Assisi is the obvious one, and yes, it’s worth it. The Basilica di San Francesco is genuinely extraordinary — the Giotto frescoes alone are worth the trip — and the town itself is more livable than its reputation suggests, especially if you get there early or stay late when the day-trippers have gone. That said, if any place in Umbria gets overrun with tourists in high season, it’s here.
Spoleto is an ancient hilltown with a Roman theater still used for performances, a stunning 14th-century aqueduct bridge, and a papal fortress with views that stop you mid-sentence. The summer Festival dei Due Mondi is the big annual event and is one of the most respected performing arts festivals in Europe — San Remo it ain’t. Outside of festival season, Spoleto is equally delightful, and a good base for exploring eastern Umbria.
Norcia is famous across Italy for its pork products (the word norcino, meaning pork butcher, comes from here), its black truffles, and its lentils from the Piano Grande, a high mountain plateau that looks like it was borrowed from a completely different country. The 2016 earthquake did significant damage to the town and rebuilding is ongoing — all the more reason to go and spend money there.
And then there’s Orvieto, which of course is central to my Italy origin story.
Orvieto, and how I ended up here
Orvieto sits high on a flat volcanic rock mesa above the surrounding valley, visible from the A1 autostrada as you drive between Rome and Florence. Its cathedral is one of the great Gothic facades in Italy — our tours always include a stop here and a really moving description from our guide, Lucianna. The town has great restaurants (which we eat at), a famous white wine (which we drink a lot of), an elaborate underground cave system (which we visit), and the storybook hilltown quality that a lot of people come to Italy in search of.
Orvieto is twenty minutes from Allerona, which is our village. I jokingly call it the big city, but when you live in a town of a few hundred people, “big” is a relative term.
I know Orvieto well because it was my entry point into this part of Umbria. It’s where I met Paolo, and where I really longed to live, even for several years after I’d moved to Allerona. Eventually, though, I began to understand that the surrounding countryside — the smaller towns, the farms, the forests — was where the real anima of Umbria lives.
Our corner of Umbria
The part of Umbria where we live and run our tours is the southwestern corner where Umbria, Tuscany and Lazio meet. It doesn’t have a famous name or a UNESCO designation or a marquee sight. What it does have is exactly what I’ve been describing: hilltowns that are actual communities rather than just tourist experiences, neighbors who are happy to welcome strangers and have you sample their food and wine, forests full of truffles and porcini, and a pace of life that genuinely slows you down — whether you intend to slow down or not.
Allerona, our base, is a medieval village of about 200 people. There’s a clock tower that will wake you up if you sleep with the windows open — which you should do because the air quality is extraordinary. There are narrow cobblestone streets and stone houses and a local bar where the same people have been drinking the same coffee at the same hour for what appears to be decades. Paolo knows every family in town (as do I, after all these years), every trail in the surrounding woods, and the location of hidden truffle patches — but I’m sworn to secrecy on those.
This is the Umbria we work with. Not all of it — there’s a lot to see in the region and there’s plenty we don’t cover. But this corner of it has been more than enough to keep me busy and honestly, a little astonished, for 17 years, and it seems to keep our guests happily engaged.
Still not convinced? Come join us for a week and I bet at the end of it, we’ll have you saying Tuscany schmuscany too.
