HILL TOWNS IN ITALY’S HEART : A RAMBLE THROUGH THE COUNTRYSIDE OF UMBRIA WHERE MEDIEVAL VILLAGES, TRUFFLES AND BRIGHT CERAMICS ARE THE DRAW

About 60 miles outside Rome, surrounded by gentle, green hills, lies the medieval mountaintop town of Todi. Outside Todi lies the hamlet of Asproli, a bucolic collection of old stone farmhouses, sleeping dogs and olive trees that march in long lines toward the horizon. Asproli, like all of Umbria, is not a large place, not a busy place, not a new place.

But it is a fine place to begin a ramble through the Italian countryside, which I did in June. The idea was to avoid the crowds of Rome and Florence, to wander by rental car from one medieval hill town to another, to eat and drink well, and to keep my nightly hotel bills under $90.

Umbria’s hills lie north of Rome and southeast of Florence, in a landlocked region that includes dozens of ancient towns, where 13th-Century piazzas stand above 1st-Century Roman forums, which lie above the ruins of Etruscan strongholds.

Umbria is probably not a common word in most households. But most Americans know more about the area than they first imagine. Umbria’s most famous town is Assisi, where St. Francis is buried. There’s also Spoleto, which stages a world-renowned summer music festival, and Deruta, which for centuries has been a leading producer of those hand-painted blue-and-yellow majolica ceramics that brighten the windows of pricey boutiques around the world.

I only had four nights in the countryside, which meant some sacrifices. I bypassed Perugia entirely, though it is Umbria’s biggest city (population: 129,000) and is said to have the region’s best art museum. I set aside Orvieto, home of a spectacular church and widely admired white wine, for a future story. Wary of festival crowds and holding no advance reservations in town, I made only a quick pass through Spoleto. I deferred the lesser-known but intriguing towns of Narni, Spello, Trevi and Montefalco for another trip. That left me with a pleasantly compact itinerary: five towns, all within 50 miles of each other.

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The biggest attraction in Umbria is Assisi, which draws 4 million visitors yearly, many of them priests and nuns from around the world. One afternoon, I interrupted one of those nuns as she strode across town, gambled that she spoke English, and asked her where she was from.

“Jersey,” she said. “Bordentown, N.J.”

Every morning, tour buses roar into the parking lots in the lower town and disgorge pilgrims, who immediately make for the Basilica di San Francesco, where the remains of St. Francis are buried and a staggering series of frescoes by Giotto, Lorenzetti and others outline the life of the saint. Their usual second stop, at the other end of town, is the 1265 Basilica di Santa Chiara, which stands between massive arched buttresses, improvised halfway through the 14th Century when it looked like the whole thing might fall down. The town sustains scores of hotels and souvenir shops, especially along Via San Francesco, which leads from the main square to St. Francis’ church, and the celebration of St. Francis’ canonization early every October fills the place to bursting.

But the pilgrims didn’t seem to compromise the place the way run-of-the-mill tourists can, and Assisi was a fascinating stop. The town lies pleasantly in the shadow of Mt. Subasio, harbors about 3,000 residents within its medieval walls, and looks out over miles of Umbrian plains. The upper portion, including the main square, the Piazza del Comune, is shielded from the heaviest foot traffic and virtually all the vehicular traffic. The Tempio di Minerva, a 1st-Century Roman construction with six great white Corinthian columns that dominate the piazza, turned out to be one of my favorite exteriors in all Umbria.

It’s easy to treat all Assisi as a prompt for reflection on the life of St. Francis (1181-1226). And standing in the basilica dedicated to him, the central irony of his relationship with the medieval church is hard to miss: After Francis spent most of his life decrying materialism and sleeping on straw in barns, 13th-Century church leaders immediately set out to honor him in death by putting up the biggest, costliest spectacle they could muster, a massive and ornately decorated church.

Franciscan or not, a visitor can spend plenty of time mulling such matters. But I chose instead to spend a few hours on the case of Santa Chiara.

Chiara, better known in English as Clare, was born the same year as Francis, became his most fervent follower at age 17, and led her own group of nuns for decades, outliving her inspiration by more than 25 years. In subsequent ages, as Francis became the world’s best-known medieval saint, Clare fell to a far lower profile, her legacy carried on by the Poor Clares, a Franciscan order of nuns.

Sister Marge McGowan, the nun from New Jersey, was one of the Poor Clares. She had come to Assisi to joins dozens of other pilgrims in a two-week series of lectures on Clare. When we fell into conversation on the street (Assisi is one of the few places on the planet where one can approach just about any stranger and fall easily into a conversation about saints), they were bullish on their saint’s prospects for a higher public profile.

“She’s just starting to make a rise,” said Pat Jensen of Milwaukee.

But I’m not sure Clare’s last honor from the church, announced in 1958, is going to get her taken more seriously in the wider world. In that year, noting that during her life Clare was said to have had holy visions, Pope Pius XII made her the Patron Saint of Television.

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South of Assisi lie Umbria’s two glamour towns, Spoleto and Todi. I took on Todi first, and spent the night five miles outside town in an agriturismo lodging called La Palazzetta.

For anyone traveling by a car, or even by bicycle, an agriturismo lodging is worth contemplating. With agricultural employment steadily falling in Umbria and elsewhere, the Italian government has been encouraging farmers to open up lodging operations, thereby preserving the countryside and giving visitors a chance to taste the region’s historically rural character. The latest government listing cites more than 175 such properties in Umbria.

The road to La Palazzetta was narrow, winding and bucolic, and my bed lay upstairs in a green-shuttered, two-story farmhouse that must have been built about the time the American Colonies started defying George III. Twenty acres of olive trees, pasture and assorted vegetable crops spread out around me, along with a swimming pool that dates back to the late 1980s. A double room was $81. My other lodgings in Umbria, all centrally located hotels, were also pleasant and beneath my $90-a-night limit--but it was at La Palazzetta that birds sang me awake.

Todi proper (population 16,000) angles its way up a steep hillside, visible for miles around. As you head up the slope, you pass the 16th-Century white dome of the Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, most prominent building in the skyline, then the Church of San Fortunato, which was begun in the 13th Century and completed in the 15th. The center of things is the Piazza del Popolo, where alongside the usual newsstand and cafes I found an antique store called Old Time, its track lights throwing flattering beams on 18th-Century doodads. Other shops displayed glittering grappa bottles and ceramics in rainbow hues.

Why the creeping chic? About 10 years ago, a University of Kentucky professor singled out the town as a model sustainable city--an honor widely translated as an anointment of Todi as the best residence in the world. Soon wealthy, artsy Romans and Americans were reported buying up villas in the area, including Yale University President Benno C. Schmidt Jr. and New Yorker European correspondent Jane Kramer, and their tastes have clearly had an impact. During my visit, the art museum housed a world-class photography exhibit, and the town’s annual arts festival, undertaken in the ‘80s, was coming up in September.

North of Todi, near the Tiber River, lie Deruta and Torgiano, unremarkable old towns, but for a single distinction each. In Deruta the distinction is ceramics; in Torgiano, it’s wine.

Ceramics production in Deruta dates back at least to 1290, and since about the 16th Century, blue-and-yellow designs have been hallmark of Deruta majolica. I first browsed the outlet stores in the otherwise uninteresting modern part of town and found umbrella stands running at about $100, roughly half what they go for in Los Angeles.

The ceramics museum in the center of town was a bust, with just three rooms, minimal explanations and only about 200 items on display. But the shops around the Piazza Consoli made the stop well worthwhile: Each held remarkably detailed work representing thousands of hours of delicate brushwork, and often the artisan himself (or herself) was leaning nearby in the shade, ready to start selling if encouraged by a question. In one of those tiny shops, I found Giovanni di Brenci squinting through low-riding, black-rimmed glasses at a vase in its early stages. While he steadied his brush-wielding right hand with his left wrist, his daughter Ambretta, a third-generation ceramist, recounted in halting English the history of the shop. How long had her father been making majolica? Seventy years. And how old was he? She lowered her voice so that he couldn’t hear. “He is 83,” she said.

Torgiano, a few miles north of Deruta, is the base of operations for the Lungarotti family, which produces some of the best-regarded red wines in all of Italy. The family also runs a wine museum and a high-end hotel-restaurant, Le Tre Vaselle, where I had the best meal of my trip, a two-hour adventure featuring pasta with black truffle sauce, sliced beef in balsamic sauce and rosemary, roasted potatoes with orange rind, and on and on.

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The wine museum, created in a 17th-Century mansion by the Lungarotti Foundation in 1974, holds a 20-room collection so diverse that it spills into eccentricity; for a visitor who cannot read the many Italian documents on display, it can seem more a museum of wine vessels than of wine itself. But I considered my $3 entry fee well spent. The vessels were gorgeous, from Etruscan urns to hundreds of pieces of majolica, and they were neighbored by ancient hoes, scythes, presses, a room of old prints illustrating the winemaking process.

So now I’d seen the famous town, the quality-of-life town, the ceramics town and the wine town. That left only the forgotten town.

Like the others, Gubbio sits on a hillside, its oldest neighborhoods guarded by ancient walls. Unlike most hill towns, however, Gubbio is near the bottom of the slope, and when you step into its streets and narrow alleys of locally quarried stone, you see steep, green Mt. Ingino looming above and around you. At the top of the mountain, connected to town by a funicular, is the basilica of Sant-Ubaldo. Against one wall of the church stand three heavy wooden structures that look like coffins on sticks, each about 12 feet high, with no discernible purpose. But on Gubbio’s one day a year of non-obscurity, these are the principal props.

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Each year on May 15, the people of Gubbio (greater Gubbio’s population is about 30,000) are joined by thousands of visitors in the celebration of the Corsa dei Ceri. In an exercise at least 900 years old, three teams of the town’s men race up the hillside through Gubbio’s narrow old streets, each team bearing overhead one of the 12-foot ceri with a wax representation attached. Think of Pamplona without bulls, but with just as much human bedlam. Each ceri is said to represent one of the town’s three patron saints, but many historians suspect that the Christian symbols have been grafted onto an old pagan exercise, and there’s no telling what that was about.

Six weeks after the great event, Gubbio still seemed hung over. Streets were quiet, the shopkeepers silently lounged on stools in front of their doors. In the space of an hour one afternoon, I passed four sidewalk cafes, and at each one sat a lone old man with a cap, a cane and a cappuccino. In the Piazza Quaranta Martiri--dedicated to 40 Gubbians who were executed by the Nazis in 1944 in reprisal for partisan attacks from the hills--a couple was crouching to collect little pine cones beneath a tree, and another grumpy old man sat scowling with his dog.

Sitting a good bit north of its more famous Umbrian brethren without a train station of its own, Gubbio gets relatively little tourist traffic. But art historians call it one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Italy, and it has its distinctions: It was here that St. Francis is said to have negotiated a truce with a wolf who had been terrorizing the town, and it is in the surrounding fields that specialist farmers have pigs that sniff out black and white truffles, fragrant fungi that fetch $100 a pound and more in American gourmet markets.

Gubbio’s most famous piece of architecture stood a few blocks up the hill from the martyrs’ piazza, and did almost nothing for me. The Palazzo dei Consoli was begun in 1321 and is much beloved by architecture buffs as a fine specimen of its time. But with its 300-foot-high tower, largely blank facade and slotted roofline (the better to allow defensive archery), it looked more like a gap-toothed, square-shouldered civic monster to me. I leaned against it, sunk to the ground and sat watching children play in the large and otherwise empty pedestrian piazza.

From there, it was but a short walk from the funicular station, which provided the thrill to cap off my Umbrian wanderings.

It’s just a six-minute ride (about $4 round trip) up the mountain, but if you have a pulse, this will quicken it. Instead of using inclined railroad cars or a spacious airborne cabin, the builders of Gubbio’s funicular have strung up a set of bright blue metal cages, each one just large enough to hold two people, open to the wind--a sort of stand-up chairlift, subject to a little swinging every time I shifted my weight. Not for the acrophobe.

But there beneath me, widening by the moment, lay Umbria in its underappreciated glory. Fields of green, gold and brown. The battered old walls and hilltop settlements. The occasional two-lane road. The red tile rooftops. Not a large place, not busy, not new. And not bad.

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GUIDEBOOK

Umbrian Wanderings

* Getting there: Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, about 80 miles south of southern Umbria, is the nearest major airport to the region. Alitalia offers one nonstop LAX-Rome flight weekly and six direct flights (with a stop in Milan) per week. TWA has one direct flight a week (via New York). Restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,218. American, Delta, KLM, Lufthansa, Swissair and United also offer connecting flights involving a change of planes..

* Getting around: If you’re exploring Umbria, your best options are renting a car or taking trains. Rental cars, most affordable if reserved from the United States, usually begin at $250-$300 per week (that’s for a subcompact with manual transmission, unlimited mileage, including 19% tax and theft insurance). All the major U.S. rental companies have offices in Italy, as do major European firms such as DER Tours and Kemwel. I used Auto Europe (telephone 800-223-5555), sprung for an automatic transmission, and paid $618 for a week. The country roads are well-maintained and well-marked, though tourists are limited to parking on the periphery of most hill towns. All the towns in this story are easily reached by train except Gubbio, whose nearest train station, Fossato di Vico, is 12 miles away. (Gubbio does have daily buses to and from Perugia.) One source of rail information is Rail Europe’s New York office at 800-438-7245.

* Where to stay: In Assisi, the Albergo Umbra (Vicolo degli Archi 6; tel. 011-39-75-812-240, fax 011-39-75-813-653) is just a few steps off the town’s main piazza, and unlike many Assisi hotels, tends not to be mobbed by tour groups. Rates: about $81 for a standard double room, breakfast excluded. In Gubbio, the Hotel Bosone Palace (Via XX de September, 22; tel. 011-39-75-922-0688, fax 011-39-75-922-0552) is an old palace with high ceilings, frescoes, restaurants and a central location. Rates: about $85 nightly for a standard double room, breakfast included. For high-end lodgings in tiny Torgiano, Le Tre Vaselle (Via Garibaldi 48; tel. 011-39-75-988-0447, fax 011-39-75-988-0214, an old palace that was transformed into a 62-room hotel/restaurant in 1978. Often hosts conferences and groups. Rates: about $175 nightly for a standard double room.

If you have a rental car, consider taking advantage of agriturismo properties, typically farmhouses that have been rehabilitated for duty as lodgings. Innkeepers may not speak much English, but rooms are often rich in character, and rates are often lower than those of city-based hotels. One example: Five miles outside Todi, in Asproli, there’s La Palazzetta (tel. 011-39-75-885-3219, fax 011-39-75-885-3358), whose proprietor speaks English. Rates: about $81 for a standard double room, breakfast included. At all agriturismo properties, booking in advance is strongly recommended; Italian Government Tourist Board has a free pamphlet listing the properties.

Rates quoted here are based on an exchange rate of 1,600 lire per $1.

* Planning ahead: For those willing to spend extra, Marjorie Shaw’s Insider’s Italy (718-855-3878, fax 718-855-3687) will interview you, devise an itinerary, make your lodging reservations and give you a detailed written itinerary briefing, with maps, restaurant recommendations and explanations of the local physical and social landscape. She doesn’t do air reservations and her services aren’t cheap: To plan a two-week trip with four destinations, she charges about $375. But Shaw can save you hours of planning.(Shaw recommended most of the hotels above, and I found them to be excellent values.)

* For more information: Italian Government Tourist Board (12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 550, Los Angeles 90025; tel. 310-820-0098

* More Umbria: Food from Italy’s heartland. L10.