Amelia

Amelia sits on a hill between the Tiber and the Nera, sixty kilometers south of Perugia and close to the Lazio border. The walls that ring the town predate the Roman conquest, and when Amelia later became a Roman municipium, the town built outward and downward at once: terraces and roads above ground, and below the main square, a system of parallel cisterns cut to hold the settlement's water. The gate on the old Via Amerina still marks the approach from outside, its current travertine form the result of sixteenth-century rework.

Just beyond it, a bronze cuirassed general over two meters tall lay buried until 1963, when it surfaced and was moved into the town's archaeological museum. The cathedral at the upper end of the centro storico carries its own layer of history, re-dedicated in the ninth century under a pope, and stands apart from the defensive and civic works that dominate the rest of the town's fabric. Amelia joined the Cittaslow network in 2004, and each summer the chamber-music festival founded in 1968 turns the town's attention outward to a different country's repertoire. The town's layers sit on top of each other rather than beside each other: pre-Roman defense, Roman engineering, medieval faith, and a modern festival calendar all occupying the same small hill in sequence.