Umbria Culture & Language

Umbria's cultural life is unusually continuous: the festivals are old, the crafts are still practised, and the religious dimension is active rather than historical.

Art

The Basilica of St Francis is the centre of it. The Upper Church's cycle of the life of Francis, traditionally attributed to Giotto, broke with Byzantine convention in ways that shaped everything after; Cimabue, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti also worked there. Later, Perugino — born near Perugia and Raphael's teacher — defined a soft, spacious Umbrian manner, and Signorelli's Last Judgment at Orvieto pushed in the opposite direction entirely.

Festivals that are not reconstructions

• The Corsa dei Ceri at Gubbio, every 15 May, sends teams running uphill carrying three wooden structures several metres tall. It has been held for around nine centuries and is a civic obligation more than an event.
• Calendimaggio in Assisi divides the town into two halves that compete over three days of song and procession.
• The Giostra della Quintana at Foligno is a serious equestrian competition.
• The Festival dei Due Mondi at Spoleto, founded in 1958, is an international festival of opera, theatre and dance; Umbria Jazz in Perugia is among Europe's major jazz festivals.

Craft

Deruta has made maiolica since the Middle Ages and its workshops still paint by hand. Gubbio has a long ceramic tradition of its own, including lustreware. Handweaving survives at Montefalco and Città di Castello, and Perugia's chocolate industry — Perugina, and the Baci with their printed notes — dates from 1907.

Religious life

Assisi remains a working pilgrimage destination, not a museum town, and the Franciscan orders are present throughout the region. Norcia is the birthplace of Benedict, founder of Western monasticism, and his rule shaped European institutions far beyond religion.

Italian is universal. English is spoken in Assisi and Orvieto, which see the most international visitors, and much less in the smaller towns and the countryside.

• Buongiorno / buonasera — on entering any shop or bar.
• Per favore, grazie, prego.
• Il conto, per favore — the bill, not brought unasked.
• Un tagliere — a board of cured meats and cheese, the standard thing to order with wine.
• È aperto oggi? — is it open today? Genuinely useful: small-town opening hours are irregular and many places close one weekday.

Umbrian speech is close to standard Italian — this is roughly where the literary language comes from — so it is easier to follow here than in the north or the deep south. Local vocabulary survives mostly in food terms: strangozzi, torta al testo (a flatbread cooked on a stone), brustengolo.