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Gualdo Tadino (Perugia province)

A town of northeastern Umbria: 43°14N, 12°47E. Altitude: 536 m. Population in 2003: 15,200.
[Seen thru a leafy foreground, a dense group of multi-story houses on a hill; poking out of it, the pointed stone belfry of a medieval church. It is the city of Gualdo Tadino.]

The center of town, with the belfry of the cathedral prominently visible.

Gualdo Tadino is a pleasant town with lots of fresh air, at the eastern edge of Umbria on the Via Flaminia between Nocera Umbra (14 km to the south) and Fossato di Vico (8 km north). It is 30 km southeast of Gubbio.

When the Romans conquered it in 266 B.C., Tadinum was already old. Unfortunately nothing remains from Antiquity, since the city, having withstood the hordes of Totila in 552, wound up razed to the ground anyway, in the late 10c by the German emperor Otho III. Rebuilding produced several Gothic churches, including the imposing 13c cathedral and the early 14c church of S. Francesco.

Along with Deruta, Gubbio, and Orvieto, Gualdo has a long tradition of ceramic manufacturing. At one point it had almost entirely shifted to industrial porcelain — bathroom fixtures and tiles — to which the lower town owes much of its current vigor while keeping its quality of life: but in recent years art production has made a comeback. Unfortunately, though, this is not a field I know anything about: if you are interested in it, you can start with this brief historical survey at UmbriaTourism.

You should not confuse Gualdo Tadino, a largish town at the NE edge of Umbria towards the Marche, with Gualdo Cattaneo, which is a much smaller town in the centre of Umbria; nor with the tiny frazione of Gualdo di Narni at the far southern tip of Umbria — nor with a lot of other places actually, given that Gualdo is a common name thru much of Italy, deriving from the same Germanic root meaning "forest" that has given the modern German word Wald.

A proper website will eventually appear here, although it might still be small: I've walked the Flaminia thru the town, stopping to visit for a few hours on the deadest Sunday in several years (see my diary, Nov. 3, 1998) and visited it again a couple of years later (July 30, 2000 with another photo). As a first step towards that proper website:

[A group of stone buildings on a low ridge, with a metal fence-type railing. It is a view of downtown Gualdo Tadino, Umbria (central Italy), that includes its two principal churches.]

[5/27/09: 8 churches, 3 pages, 9 photos ]

The churches of Gualdo: For now, just a sampler — stay posted.

Finally, in addition to the more general links in the navigation bar at the bottom of this page, if you are interested in caves or mountain hiking the area is your kind of place, and you should contact the very active Gruppo Speleologico di Gualdo Tadino.

Frazioni

Like most of the comuni in Italy, Gualdo Tadino 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 have been to a number of these frazioni: for now most links will either be offsite or just to my diary, occasionally even including a photograph; I do hope to put more formal pages online at some point.

Boschetto •  Busche •  Caprara •  Cerqueto •  Corcia and Petroia • Crocicchio • Gaifana • Grello • Morano •  Palazzo Mancinelli • Pastina •  Piagge • Pieve di Compresseto (a lovely site, and a large one too, for so small a place) •  Poggio Sant' Ercolano •  Rasina •  Rigali • S. Pellegrino (onsite — and offsite: 1 •  2) •  Vaccara

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Site updated: 6 Dec 21

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