All the monuments in Perugia
The landmarks and masterpieces worth planning a day around.
PalacePalazzo dei PrioriNational Gallery of Umbria, Perugino and Piero della Francesca, Sala dei Notari, Gothic civic facadePerugia’s town hall has run city business from the same crenellated palace since 1297, its Gothic facade fanning out along Corso Vannucci with a griffin and a lion cast in bronze guarding the entrance stairs, copies of medieval originals kept safe inside. Climb past the Sala dei Notari, the vaulted hall where notaries once met under painted arches and civic coats of arms, to reach the National Gallery of Umbria on the upper floors. Its rooms trace Umbrian painting from Duccio to the 18th century, but the real subject is Pietro Perugino, whose calm, spacious landscapes taught a teenage Raphael everything he would later refine in Rome. Piero della Francesca’s polyptych for Sant’Antonio hangs nearby, worth the climb on its own.Plan the visit
FountainFontana MaggiorePisano father and son reliefs, medieval encyclopedia in marble, aqueduct endpoint, pink and white basinsNicola and Giovanni Pisano carved the marble panels of this two-basin fountain between 1278 and 1280, working from a design by the Perugian friar Bevignate da Cingoli, while the engineer Boninsegna Veneziano solved the harder problem: lifting water to the top of the hill without a single pump. The lower basin's fifty reliefs run through the months, the zodiac, the liberal arts and scenes from Genesis and Roman history, a stone almanac for a city that could not yet print one. Above, twenty-four bronze and marble figures include personifications of Perugia and Rome standing alongside the city's own patron saints. An earthquake cracked the fountain in 1348, and restorers have returned to it twice since, most recently in the 1990s. It still marks the endpoint of the medieval aqueduct that climbs through Perugia's lanes to reach it.
Ipogeo dei VolumniHidden GemHypogeum of the VolumniiEtruscan family tomb, Arnth Velimna’s banqueting urn, Palazzone necropolisBeneath a quiet suburb of Perugia lies one of the best-preserved Etruscan family tombs in Italy. A staircase leads down into a chamber cut from the rock and shaped to echo a Roman house, with an atrium and side rooms, where the Velimna family, Volumni in Latin, placed their dead in travertine and terracotta urns. The urn of Arnth Velimna Aules shows him reclining as if at a banquet, a Roman fashion adopted by the Etruscan elite. The tomb dates to the third or second century BC and was rediscovered in 1840. It belongs to the larger Palazzone necropolis of nearly 200 tombs at Ponte San Giovanni, with an antiquarium beside it.
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More within reach
Monuments a day trip away, elsewhere in Umbria.
AssisiUNESCOBasilica of San FrancescoGiotto's Life of Saint Francis, two churches stacked, the saint's tomb, Cimabue frescoes
TerniMarmore Falls271 BC Roman origin, 165-meter triple drop, scheduled water releases, Byron's verses, six hiking trails
OrvietoOrvieto CathedralGold-ground façade mosaics and marble reliefs; Signorelli’s San Brizio frescoes; the Chapel of the Corporal; basalt-and-travertine bands.
AssisiUNESCOBasilica of Santa ChiaraSaint Clare's tomb, San Damiano crucifix, pink-striped Gothic facade, flying buttress profile
OrvietoSt. Patrick's WellDouble-helix staircases, 53-meter depth, Sangallo design, 1527-1537 construction, siege-proof water supply
SpoletoSpoleto CathedralLippi's last frescoes, sloping piazza, Romanesque façade with mosaic, Festival dei Due Mondi stage
TorgianoHidden GemWine Museum of TorgianoCulture-of-wine museum, Etruscan and Roman vessels, engravings, Lungarotti tasting glass
TerniHidden GemCarsulaeTwin forum temples, Via Flaminia paving, Arco di San Damiano, mysteriously abandoned Roman town