Now we arrive in Umbria, the only region of Italy both landlocked and sharing a border with no other nation, full of medieval castles and monasteries, home to several saints.
Easily the most famous historical son of Umbria is Saint Francis of Assisi. He was the son of a wealthy merchant who got fed up with the status quo, stripped naked in front of his famous father in the town square, and wandered off to be a benevolent hippie and freelance diplomat. His humanism extended to other species, and his affection and gentleness toward animals became one of his most legendary traits - his sermons to itinerant flocks of birds were especially well received.
The city of Foligno was founded in the Roman period and flourished until being sacked by the Saracens, and then sacked again by the Magyars, whereupon its inhabitants decided to give up and move, relocating the town nearby with the help of the refugees of a neighboring city who had just been sacked by the Lombards.
Foligno became a prosperous and refined city in the Renaissance after all the sacking calmed down, and is notable as the place of publication of the first printed edition of Dante's Divina Commedia in 1472.
The turbulent medieval history of the city is reflected in its grand summer tradition: the Giostra della Quintana. This is a Renaissance faire in a country that actually had a Renaissance, a jousting tournament on horseback that pits ten of the city's twenty historic districts against each other. Riders must best three challenges in the fastest time possible. The target is a wooden dummy representing Mars, the god of war, who holds a brass ring that the riders must capture with their lances while avoiding collisions with the flags that line the field of play.
The night before the joust is full of festivities, from a citywide procession in period costume, to a feast, to the ceremonial recitation of a poem that declares the joust begun, written in florid and evocative high-Renaissance style but composed in 1946.
Italy is full of such jousts and medieval-Renaissance pageantry - one day the Giro will ride through Arezzo and I'll get to write about my two weird nights at the Giostra del Saracino and my feud with the local gelato guy as we discovered that my apartment and his shop were on opposite sides of a district border - but the events in Foligno may be among the most spectacular.
The arrival of the tour of Umbria is the hilltop town of Montefalco, a small place full of the usual Romanesque churches and frescoes by famous artists from Florence and Perugia. Like Umbria itself, Montefalco could easily be overlooked and forgotten in the shadow of its flashier and more popular neighbors - but for one thing.
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| Booze! |
The Sagrantino grape native to the area has one of the highest tannin levels of any varietal in the world, difficult to tame and producing wine so dark it's almost black. The name of the grape comes from sacro, holy, because the earliest method of getting wine out of these bitter grapes was to semi-dry them, concentrating what sugars they contain, before fermenting the thick syrupy juice into a sweet wine that the monks of the region used for Communion. In recent decades, however, Montefalco's winemakers have figured out how to make a dry red from the Sagrantino grapes, still intensely dark and acidic, but complex and intriguing. According to Consorzio Tutela Vini Montefalco, production of the Sagrantino DOCG red wine quadrupled between 2000 and 2008, and the boom continues.
Finally, and this has nothing to do with the itinerary of the Giro, but as long as we're in Umbria I just have to make passing mention of the Republic of Cospaia.
This was a tiny town, a suburb of the also small town of San Giustino, that by sheer bureaucratic accident was left unmentioned in a sale of land between the Papal States and Republic of Florence in 1440. Seizing the opportunity, the inhabitants of the hamlet unilaterally declared themselves independent and proclaimed the Republic of Cospaia.
Governing themselves through a council of elders who met in the local church, the republic quickly took advantage of no longer being subject to the laws of the Papal States and cornered the market in tobacco farming, an enterprise then banned by the Vatican. So Cospaia prospered for nearly four hundred years, until 1826 when its fourteen surviving citizens signed an agreement ceding their territory to Tuscany and the Papal States again, in exchange for one silver coin and the right to continue farming tobacco.
Long live the memory of the bold Republic of Cospaia, one of the best examples I've ever seen of the Italian talent for flying through life by the seat of their pants.
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