Monte Santa Maria Tiberina

The town takes its name from the mountain it sits on, 688 meters, on the Umbria-Tuscany border, forty kilometers north of Perugia above the Upper Tiber valley. From the eleventh century the territory was a fief of the Marquis Bourbon del Monte, descendants of the Frankish Marquis del Colle who conquered much of the Upper Tiber. Their marquisate became an imperial fief in 1250 and stayed one until 1815, six and a half centuries of de facto independence from both Florence and Rome, the longest-running noble enclave in central Italy.

Inside the walls the palace and the family chapel sit together as the dynastic core of the borgo, the stone record of a family that answered to the emperor rather than to Florence or Rome. Beyond the walls the slopes fall away into chestnut woods and pasture, the basis of the Città del Castagno membership, and from the ridge the ground drops toward the valley and Citerna, tracing the old corridor along the river toward the Tuscan border. A summit village, self-contained behind its walls, ruling a chestnut-covered mountain for six centuries without belonging to either neighbor: that is the shape of the place.