Acquasparta

Acquasparta sits on a hill above the Naia valley, fifty kilometers south of Perugia and thirteen north of the UNESCO town of Spoleto. The medieval upper town is walled around the palace at its center, its lanes climbing toward the piazza named for Federico Cesi. In 1588 Pope Sixtus V raised the territory to a duchy under the Cesi family, and it was Federico Cesi, the cardinal's descendant, who brought his young Accademia dei Lincei here from Rome in the early seventeenth century to convene around his cabinet of natural specimens: Galileo Galilei was among those who came, staying at the palace in 1624 to demonstrate his microscope.

Outside the walls, the Furapane and Amerino springs draw on a different history, met by the Roman censor Flaminio in the second century BC and still bottled commercially now. The town holds both threads at once, a duchy's palace turned briefly into a meeting place for the new science, and a valley whose waters were already known to antiquity. Together with the medieval upper town, they earned Acquasparta its listing among the Borghi più belli.