Città di Castello

Città di Castello sits at the head of the Alta Valtiberina, the upper Tiber valley, where the river that runs through Rome 250 km south is still a narrow, Tuscany-style stream. It is the largest town in Umbria north of Perugia, 56 km from the regional capital and reachable by the historic Trenino Centrale Umbra line. The town's history sits in three layers.

Roman: founded as Tifernum Tiberinum in the 1st c BC, with Pliny the Younger keeping a villa here and describing the upper Tiber landscape in his letters. Medieval-Renaissance: a walled town run as a signoria by the Vitelli family from the 15th c, whose patronage brought a young painter to the centro to complete his first independent commissions, among them the altarpiece now in the Pinacoteca Comunale, before he left for Rome; the same Pinacoteca, housed in the Vitelli family's own palazzo, also holds works by Signorelli, Ghirlandaio and Della Robbia. Twentieth century: a native-born artist gave his name to a foundation that now runs two sites in the centro, a palazzo holding the earlier period of his work and a former tobacco-drying complex painted black inside and out for the monumental late series, together forming, by the town's own reckoning, the most complete single-artist museum after Picasso's.

Beyond the art, the town carries three Città quality marks: Città del Tartufo for its white truffle zone, which produces some of the best Tuber magnatum in Italy and is marked each November by a weekend market and festival; Città della Ceramica for a maiolica tradition dating to the 16th c and still worked in a dozen workshops across the centro; and a stop on the Cammino di San Francesco, the pilgrim route linking La Verna in Tuscany, where St Francis received the stigmata, to Assisi, his birthplace. There is also a horse fair in early September, the Mostra Nazionale del Cavallo, a Renaissance music festival in July called the Tibernum Festival, and a centro storico whose medieval walls survive in part and can be walked. The food follows the valley: ciaramicola, the local Easter cake, strangozzi with truffle, the Vitellone Bianco dell'Appennino Centrale IGP beef, pecorino, and the local Sangiovese-based Colli Altotiberini DOC red. What the layers add up to is a river town that kept building on itself rather than being replaced: a Roman villa landscape, a Renaissance signoria that imported a major painter, and a modern art foundation occupying old tobacco warehouses, each still visible in the centro rather than paved over by the one that followed it.