Northern Umbria is the mind and soul of the region. The morning mists rolling over the hills of this "green heart of Italy" imbue the place with a sort of magic, an ethereal spirituality that shines from the paintings of Perugino and that has, in the past, coalesced into saints such as Francis and Clare.
The capital city, Perugia, is the birthplace of the Umbrian style of painting, which took form during the Renaissance in the work of Perugino and his students Pinturicchio and Raphael. Perugia gets hip each fall with one of Europe's greatest jazz festivals and spends the rest of its time selling Baci chocolates to the world. Nearby Assisi was home to St. Francis, Italy's patron saint and favorite mystic. The basilica raised to honor St. Francis was decorated by the greatest artists of the early Renaissance: Cimabue, Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Giotto.
Northern Umbria was the stronghold of the ancient Umbri tribes, neighbors to the Etruscans and even more mysterious. Their strange half-forgotten culture continues to manifest itself in colorful pagan festivals such as the Corso dei Ceri in the stony northern border town of Gubbio. Umbria continues in many ways to be a green heart of silence, a landscape of contemplation, and a historic core of overgrown villages surrounded by wild corners of the Apennines where wolves still roam and roads don't go.
