Perugia historical timeline

Perugia has been continuously inhabited on the same hilltop for about two and a half thousand years, and the city keeps the evidence of each phase in use rather than in a case.

1. 310–309 BC — Perusia appears in the written record, one of the twelve confederated cities of Etruria. The Etruscan Arch and the Pozzo Etrusco survive from this city; so does the line of its walls, which the medieval city followed.
2. 41–40 BC — the Perusine War. The city backed Lucius Antonius against Octavian, who besieged and took it. The arch's Roman inscription, Augusta Perusia, was added afterwards and sits above the Etruscan one — a conqueror writing over a conquered text and leaving it legible.
3. 251–253 AD — refounded as Colonia Vibia Augusta Perusia.
4. 547 — taken by the Ostrogoths under Totila during the Gothic war.
5. 1186 — Henry VI grants diplomatic recognition to Perugia's consular government. The free commune that follows is the city at its most powerful: it fought Siena, Florence and Assisi, and built the Fontana Maggiore and the Palazzo dei Priori to say so.
6. 1393–1398 — Biordo Michelotti rules the city; 1416–1424 Braccio da Montone; and from 1438 to 1540 the Baglioni, whose internal feuds are the backdrop to Perugino's working life.
7. 1540 — Perugia loses a tax war with Pope Paul III, and the pope builds the Rocca Paolina on top of the Baglioni quarter to make the point permanent. An entire district of the city is buried intact beneath it.
8. 1798 — French conquest; the short-lived Tiberina Republic.
9. June 1859 — a rising against papal authority is suppressed with enough bloodshed to become a national grievance.
10. September 1860 — Perugia joins the Kingdom of Italy. The citizens demolish the upper fortress almost immediately and leave the buried streets beneath it.
11. 20 June 1944 — liberated by the British Eighth Army.
12. 1973 — the first Umbria Jazz, which has run annually since and made a provincial capital into a festival city.
13. 2008 — the Minimetro opens, and the hill stops being an argument.