Traveling In Style : PARADISO FOUND : With Its Lovely Piazza, Unpretentious Restaurants and Genial Inhabitants, Ancient Todi Is the Ultimate Italian Hill Town

I FIRST HEARD OF TODI WHILE SITTING AT A SUSHI BAR IN MANHATTAN. THERE, I ran into an old newspaper friend, who raved about the place--mixing truth with poetry, as I later found out. “Todi is a beautiful town, so isolated that it’s practically out of this world,” he told me. “And you can buy a house in the countryside there for $5,000.” The $5,000 was the poetical part, though the beauty and seclusion of Todi were indisputable. Many five-thousands of dollars later, I became a resident of the town.

Todi--the ancient Tudernum of the Romans--is a tawny-colored city brooding gently on a peak overlooking the meandering Tiber River in Umbria--itself a tranquil, largely rural region of Italy roughly centered between Rome and Florence. One of the smallest and least pretentious of the country’s many hill towns, Todi is also one of the most pleasant cities on Earth. No wonder, then, that it has recently been “discovered”--and that I am one of many Americans who live there now. A recent Wall Street Journal story on Todi, in fact, quoted a local laborer as complaining that “The Americans are buying up everything.”

Among the new Todini are Steven J. Ross, chairman of Time Warner Inc., who not long ago paid $1.5 million for 250 acres and a borgo (a ruined castle and its outbuildings) on a hillside about five miles outside the city walls; playwright/screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (“Tru”); Benno Schmidt, president of Yale University, and his wife, filmmaker Helen Whitney; artists Al Held and Beverly Pepper, and Jane Kramer, Paris-based European correspondent for the New Yorker. Other wealthy and/or arty Americans are undoubtedly heading this way.

To make matters worse, last year, Richard Levine, professor of architecture and co-director of a center for urban studies at the University of Kentucky, chose Todi as his model of the “sustainable city”--a paradigm of sensible urban scale. (The Italian press, incidentally, headlined this news by saying that he had called the place “The World’s Most Livable City,” which is not quite the same thing.)

Yet this city of some 25,000 souls has proved to be surprisingly resistant to foreign incursions: Todi remains, thus far, a demiparadise. All this new recognition is unlikely to spoil the city too much; it is too old and too stubborn to be changed by flattery. The maze of old buildings at its heart is still virtually untouched, as is the spirit of its people. If anything, the newcomers might even have infused Todi with some new life.

Living in the shadow of the more glamorous Tuscany region to the north, Umbria in general is characterized by easy humor, genial tolerance and an old-fashioned, spontaneous courtesy that cushions every human encounter--making it a pleasure even to shop for the basic necessities. It has a gentle look to it. The hills and valleys that undulate beneath the distant Appennines are softer and more rounded than the sharp hills of Tuscany. But the square-turreted castles of buff stone that crown the ridges are fiercely martial. Cities like Todi were built on peaks for easier defense in Etruscan times, even before the Romans came.

The seasons are sharply delineated in Umbria by the colors of the land. Spring with its rains is pale green, except where the olive trees shine silver in the sunlight. Early summer is a luxuriantly ripe green, except where acres of sunflowers glow golden. In arid August, the deep, ripe green fields fade to pale ocher and umber. In autumn, when the crops are gathered and innumerable rows of vines are stripped of their grapes, the land appears barren. Yet even in winter, the pines and live oaks, boldly jade and emerald, thrust up assertively against the startlingly blue Italian sky.

THE HEART OF TODI IS THE PIAZZA DEL POpolo, acclaimed by aficionados of such things as “the finest small square in Italy.” The piazza is human-sized, austerely beautiful, compact and modest. It is no antiseptic monument to the past, although it is palisaded by ancient buildings. It is a place for men and women to meet and chat and relax, unawed by its grandeur. Its paving stones have felt the tramp of foreign armies--Perugian, Spanish, Imperial Roman and Imperial Austrian--as well as the softer tread of jugglers, acrobats and jesters. Eight centuries ago, the brownstone facades that frame it echoed the eloquence of the Blessed Jacopone, a Franciscan friar who denounced the Pope for tyranny and exhorted the Todini to march on the Vatican. A poet as well, Jacopone is the city’s best-loved son, virtually its patron saint--though he has not been canonized.

The greatest tumult in the Piazza nowadays is the shrilling of police whistles warning against illegal parking, or the firecrackers exuberantly exploding here on holidays. In the autumn, the square rings with hammer blows as grandstands and a wooden court are erected for the contests called “Basket in Piazza”--which are nothing more or less than basketball games, inevitably dominated by black athletes from America. In the autumn, too, placards and banners advertising the Todi Festival brighten the piazza. For the past five years, the city has boasted that latest essential attribute of every self-respecting Umbrian municipality, an artistic festival, whose offerings range from avant-garde plays and sculpture to traditional opera and concerts.

For me, however, Todi is most appealing when it is more private--off-season, when men and women, muffled against the cold fogs of winter, move across the square as stiffly as automatons and when elderly priests, erect in heavy black overcoats, avert their eyes as they pass teen-age girls contemptuous of the wind in buttock-skimming miniskirts and sheer black stockings. Two habitues of the piazza are treated with particular politesse by all Todini: the demented 50-year-old man who stands in the center of the square haranguing imaginary crowds, and the widow in her late 80s who is, as they say, “a little vague.”

The Piazza del Popolo was not always so peaceful. In 1276, soldiers of the Pope clashed in the square with soldiers of the Holy Roman Emperor. More seriously, from the Todini viewpoint, was the lightning that toppled the bell tower of the 11th-Century cathedral, or Duomo, in 1533; it split a wall on its way down, smashed the great wooden doors and killed a sacristan.

Near the Duomo is the 12th-Century Palace of the Captain. Reached by two broad flights of outside steps, the chambers built for the autocratic captain of the community are the offices of the present-day mayor. Todi was an independent republic when the palace was built, but the dragon emblem of Terni on its front recalls the city’s subjugation to that neighboring town.

At the foot of the Piazza, at right angles to the Palace of the Captain, stands the four-story Palace of the Priors, administrators appointed to safeguard the interests of the common people. In 1513, Pope Leo X ordered that structure restored to house the governor of the papal state of Todi. Today, the palace, still formidable beneath its warlike turret, is home to a bank, the law courts and the local office of the carabinieri --the most gorgeously uniformed of the four separate police forces that watch over this little town. (This proliferation of law-keepers has more to do with bureaucracy and guaranteeing local employment than it does with security.)

Strict regulations keep commerce from spoiling the piazza. Though suggestively named, the lingerie shop called Venere Intimo (“Intimate Beauty”) must make do with a modest window display of black undergarments. Two outlets of the ubiquitous Benetton clothing chain face each other with only discreet signs glowing in their windows.

There are occasional changes on the square, of course. With prosperity, Fornetti’s electrical shop has moved from its original premises to a grander site opposite the Palace of the Captain, and Manni’s fruit store has just been redecorated for the third time in four years. In 1983, the Banco Popolare took over an entire building on the square, forcing Foglietti’s bookshop to move behind the arches of the great stairway of the Palace of the Captain.

Luigi Foglietti’s great-grandfather ran a print shop and bookshop in the old building 120 years ago. Luigi now complains, by no means wholly in jest, that it’s very hard being a bookseller in Todi in this electronic age. Yet some 25,000 Todini support three bookshops as well as 15 newspaper kiosks. And Luigi practices his trade with panache. It took him just 18 hours to obtain a lavishly illustrated volume on the palaces of Venice, which I needed for research for a novel. In Los Angeles or New York, I would have been lucky to get the book in a week.

Todi’s dedication to tradition, on the other hand, is demonstrated by Todini food and wine, which are sometimes consumed in astonishing quantity and are more likely to be robust than memorable. The town of Torgiano, about 15 miles away, even smaller than Todi, produces some of the finest wines in Italy--notably those made by Cantine Giorgio Lungarotti, a family-owned firm that combines modern scientific winemaking techniques with old-fashioned pride in craftsmanship. Todi, however, can’t be bothered to improve its own humdrum wines; locals buy them at the Cantina Sociale, the local cooperative, from spigots like gasoline pumps. For most Todini, wine is a necessity, not a luxury. They just drink the stuff without making a fuss about it.

In the kitchens of Todi, home and restaurant alike, the most important piece of equipment is still the girarrosto, a medieval-style spit, now powered by electricity. On this spit, over open wood-fueled fires, Todini roast the meats that are the staple here--beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, pork, wild boar, pigeon, rabbit, hare and pheasant. Straightforward cooking of this sort is the specialty of the Ristorante Umbria, which looks across the valley of the Tiber from its perch behind Foglietti’s bookshop.

Todi preserves old customs in other ways, too. In the groves on the hillsides, men and women still search for the big straw-colored mushrooms called porcini and painstakingly collect slim-stalked wild asparagus. They still hunt the black Umbrian truffles with sniffer dogs, as did their ancestors. One local farmer is highly esteemed because, as he boasts, he can sniff out a truffle as well as any dog. Near our house lives a young mother who firmly believes that the rocks under her fields regularly give birth to baby rocks that grow up and reproduce in their turn.

This is all part of Todi’s ancient magic--a magic as old as the centuries, capable of enduring any invasion, endlessly fascinating, an eternal treasure. Sustainable indeed.

GUIDEBOOK: GOING TO TODI

Getting there: Alitalia flies nonstop from Los Angeles to Milan five times a week, with direct connections to Rome. Todi is about 80 miles north of Rome by car. There is also a bus to Todi leaving Rome’s Piazza Esedra terminal daily at 4 p.m. Fare is about $13 one way, $21 round trip.

Where to stay: In Todi itself, Elegant recommends the Hotel Bramante, Via Orvietana (telephone 011-39-75-884-8382), where the rooms are modern and comfortable though without any particular character; the Hotel San Valentino, Collina San Valentino (telephone 011-39-75-894-4103), offers luxurious but overdecorated rooms and a popular restaurant with good if not brilliant food and excellent wines. Le Tre Vaselle (telephone 011-39-75-982447), in nearby Torgiano, run by the Lungarotti wine family, is both an attractive inn and a good restaurant.

Where to eat: Besides the aforementioned hotel restaurants and Ristorante Umbria, Via San Bonaventura 13 (local telephone 882-737), Elegant likes Cavour, Via Cavour 21-23 (local telephone 882-491), for its superb pizzas with thin crusts. Umbria’s gastronomic showcase is Vissani, Localita Civitella del Lago, Baschi, (local telephone 0744-950-396), about 20 miles from Todi on the road to Perugia. Ranked by guidebooks as one of Italy’s three best restaurants, Vissani serves highly sophisticated multi-course meals with prices that rival those of Paris, London or New York. For diners with less stamina and smaller budgets, try Vissani’s more modest Il Padrino, same address (local telephone 0744-950-206).