Narni

The old town sits on a travertine outcrop 240m above the Nera valley, and its Roman name came from the Nar, the river's older name before it became the Nera. Lewis read the word in an atlas as a boy and kept it for thirty years before it resurfaced in his fiction; he never visited, and the resemblance stops at the name, though the comune now runs an annual 'Le notti di Narnia' summer festival and a small themed museum around the connection. The marker for the geographical center sits at the foot of the old town, on the side of the road below the centro, a fact of surveying rather than of history, and it sits oddly alongside the older Roman and medieval claims the town makes on the visitor.

The town itself reads in layers. At the summit is the Piazza dei Priori, a medieval set-piece anchored by the 13th-c Palazzo dei Priori, and near it the Cattedrale di San Giovenale, 12th-c Romanesque with a 14th-c Gothic façade added later. Also at the high point stands the papal fortress built for a cardinal in 1370, square in plan with four corner towers, looking down over the valley where the Nera meets the Tiber.

Below the centro, where the ground drops toward the river, is where the Roman bridge crossed at height before losing all but one arch, a crossing later painted by both Corot and Turner. The horse-jousting pageant between the town's three terzieri, Mezule, Fraporta, and Santa Maria, runs on the second Sunday of May and has done, in its current form, since 1371, older than the fortress above it. Underneath the town, reached through an ordinary-looking church, is a sealed underground world of cells and a former torture chamber that has nothing to do with any of the above except that it was carved into the same hill, found again only by accident in the twentieth century.

The food follows the same logic as the setting: strangozzi with truffle, since Narni sits on the edge of the Valnerina truffle zone, along with porchetta, pecorino, and the local Ciliegiolo and Sangiovese. What holds it together is verticality: a town built up along a ridge and then, unknown to most who walk through it, dug down, so that the fortress at the top, the bridge at the base, and the cells beneath are all separated by the same hill that gives the valley its view.

From Rome Fiumicino (FCO), about 1 h 23 min by car.

Ancona (AOI) is about 2 h 34 min away.

By car from the center of Perugia 1 h 8 min or Siena 2 h 1 min.

There is a railway station in the comune, so you can arrive without a car.

Coming from Rome or Florence?

Coming by train into Perugia? Narni is about 1 h 8 min away by road.

Every town within reach of Rome Fiumicino airport.

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