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Città della Pieve (Perugia province)

A town of western Umbria: 42°56.4N, 12°00E. Altitude: 509 m. Population in 2003: 7200.

[A long wall of mixed brick and stone; above it, nothing can be seen except an overcast sky — and to the far left the upper story of a cupola-crowned square four-arched brick belfry. It is a whimsical view of Città della Pieve, Umbria (central Italy).]

Wherever you look, there seems to be a tall brick tower:

as I walked around Città della Pieve, this was just one of the more unusual instances.

Città della Pieve sits on a hill overlooking the Tiber on the western edge of Umbria, about 20 km S of Lake Trasimeno and 8 km from Chiusi across the Tuscan border. Though not very large, it's an attractive, compact place with a strong urban feel to it; its churches and palazzi were built of brick within a fairly short span of time, from the late Middle Ages thru the Renaissance, and give the city a happy unity of style.

It is principally famous as the birthplace of two painters of that same period: one of them distinguished, il Pomarancio; and the other great: Pietro Vannucci, known to posterity as Perugino.

The cathedral (Duomo) is a late medieval building with several paintings by each, as well as a number of other works of the Renaissance. An even more famous fresco by Perugino, a Nativity and Wise Men, may be seen in the Oratory of S. Maria de' Bianchi. Among the town's other beautiful churches the Oratory of S. Bartolomeo deserves special mention, with a good fresco of the Crucifixion.

[ 3 pages, 11 photos ]

In the countryside about a mile out of town, The Madonna della Sanità, though only a tiny chapel (occupying less than half the building you see here), has a handsome Romanesque tympanum and a fairly good painting by a pupil of Perugino.

[ 1/2/07: 1 page, 7 photos not included above ]

The other churches, for now, are represented onsite only by a photosampler page, while I spin out the individual sites.

[4/5/08: 1 page, 3 photos ]

The basic information, for the time being, is onsite only in Italian, with the Città della Pieve section of Umbrian historian Mariano Guardabassi's Indice-guida dei monumenti dell' Umbria (1872); dry but illustrated with some of my own photos.

Città della Pieve is also proud of its Roman well, 62 meters deep, and of its somewhat ruined medieval Rocca, dating to the 14c — and boasts a number of Renaissance mansions: since I've seen a fair amount of the town and its surroundings, a fuller website is obviously on its way, although pending those more formal pages, you should find it useful to read the Apr. 18, 2004 entry of my diary, which also includes one more photograph. For more complete information though, see the sites in the navigation bar at the bottom of this page.

Frazioni

Like most of the comuni in Italy, Città della Pieve includes in its territory some smaller towns and hamlets, of a few hundred inhabitants if that, with a certain administrative identity of their own: as elsewhere in Italy, these are referred to as the frazioni of the comune (singular: frazione, literally a "fraction"): a complete list of them follows. I've only been to the first two; any link to Ponticelli will be offsite.

Moiano • Pò Bandino • Ponticelli

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