Umbria historical timeline

Origins

Two peoples give the region its layers. The Umbri held the east; the Etruscans held the west bank of the Tiber, founding Perugia and Orvieto. The Eugubine Tablets at Gubbio — seven bronze tablets from the 3rd to 1st centuries BC — are the most substantial surviving text in the Umbrian language and the single most important source for the Italic languages other than Latin.

Rome absorbed the area by the 3rd century BC and ran the Via Flaminia through it, which is why Spoleto, Foligno and Narni sit where they do.

Lombards and communes

After Rome, the Duchy of Spoleto was one of the most durable Lombard states, lasting in some form from 576 to the 12th century. As it broke up, the towns governed themselves as communes and spent several centuries fighting each other — Perugia against Assisi, Gubbio against everyone — which is why the hilltops are fortified and the towns look at each other across the valley.

Francis of Assisi

The decisive figure. Born around 1181 to a wealthy Assisi cloth merchant, Francis renounced his inheritance, founded an order committed to poverty, and was canonised within two years of his death in 1226. Construction of the basilica began in 1228, and the greatest painters of the age were brought to decorate it — which is how a small hill town came to hold a turning point in European art. Clare, his contemporary and the founder of the Poor Clares, was also from Assisi.

Papal rule

From the 14th century the Papal States absorbed the communes one at a time, and Perugia's resistance ended with the Rocca Paolina — a fortress Pope Paul III built in 1540 directly over an entire quarter of the city, burying its streets rather than demolishing them. Umbrians tore it down after unification in 1860; the buried streets remain and can be walked.

Three centuries of papal government left the region economically marginal, which is precisely why its medieval fabric survived so completely.

Modern Umbria

Unification in 1860 was followed by slow industrialisation around Terni, which became a steel town and was heavily bombed in the Second World War — the reason it looks unlike anywhere else in the region. Since the 1980s Umbria has built an identity around food, wine and cultural tourism, and around earthquake recovery in the east.

What is visible now

Etruscan walls and gates under medieval towns, the Roman Via Flaminia's alignment, Lombard Spoleto, communal palaces facing each other across hilltop squares, and the buried streets under Perugia.