Perugia's Medieval Pompeii
To cow the insurgent Perugini into submission after he put down their rebellion against his salt tax, Pope Paul III demolished more than one-quarter of the city in 1530, pointedly including the palaces of the fractious former leaders, the Baglioni family. He then ordered Antonio da Sangallo the Younger to build him a fortress, the Rocca Paolina, in the gaping empty space. By 1543, the massive bastion was complete, and it helped uphold papal domination over Perugia for more than 300 years. At the Italian unification in 1860, when Perugia was finally freed from the pope's yoke, workers came to dismantle the fortress. They found themselves outnumbered, however, as almost every man, woman, and child in the city descended with grim faces on the hated rocca and began to tear it apart stone by stone with pickaxes, shovels, and their bare hands.
Sangallo didn't merely raze all the buildings, however. The land sloped away from Perugia's ridge here in all three directions, so to make a flat plain on which to build the fortress; he leveled the field, using the houses, towers, and churches in the area as supports for the rocca, aided by brick pillars and vaults. In the process, a whole neighborhood of the medieval town was preserved, intact but eerily silent and still, buried beneath the newer streets above. The vaults of the rocca now serve as a public exhibition space, and stretches of the subterranean streets are interspersed with the escalators that connect Piazza Italia, which partially takes up the space the dismantled fortress left, with the parking lots below. An underground "Via Baglioni" leads through a section of this almost-forgotten city, with dozens of houses and churches abandoned for hundreds of years. The mid-20th-century travel writer H. V. Morton called it a medieval Pompeii and imagined its narrow alleys and ruined buildings inhabited by covens of witches brewing Perugia's notorious poisons. You can clamber through doorless entrances, climb the remains of stairways, walk through empty rooms, and wander at will through the maze of mute walls. Bring a flashlight.
Sangallo also couldn't bring himself to destroy the Etruscan Porta Marzia (Mars Gate) to the city. He quietly had workers take it apart and reassemble it as a doorway to the fortress's outer wall, where Via Baglioni now reemerges into the sunlight onto Via Marzia. The worn, dark stone heads probing out from around the arch are said to be those of Etruscan gods.
You can enter the underground city daily from 8am to 7pm (no admission fee) from the escalators at the Prefettura on Piazza Italia, through the Porta Marzia on Via Marzia, or by riding the escalators up from Piazza Partigiani.
