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Magione (Perugia province)

A town of western Umbria: 43°08.8N, 12°12E. Altitude: 299 m. Population in 2003: 12,700.

[A sunny landscape of low rolling hills, with a clump of olive trees in the foreground, higher hills in the background, one of which supports a permit square tower; in the middle ground, a small town of maybe 4,000 inhabitants. It is a view of Magione and its surroundings, in Umbria (central Italy).]

Magione from the road to Montecolognola.

Magione is a small town in west central Umbria, about 20 km west of Perugia, overlooking Lake Trasimeno about 2 km away. Its name derives from the French maison, "house": the house was that of the Knights Templar, a massive fortress on the top of the hill, and it remains today the property of a knightly order, the Sovereign Order of Malta, to which any application to visit must be made, since it is not normally open to the public.

The area used to depend for its livelihood on fishing — a fishing museum in the frazione of S. Feliciano, for example — but as the lake continues to dry up, has shifted to light industry. There are a number of small medieval walled towns in the area, more or less ruined, and several churches of interest, the best of which is probably the abbey of Sant' Arcangelo, recently restored.

Magione is famous among medieval specialists as the home of Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a Franciscan monk who travelled to the court of the Great Khan of the Tatars a quarter century before Marco Polo. He wrote a book about it, the Historia Mongolorum. (For further details, see this offsite page which spells the man's name a bit differently.)

I've been to Magione twice, if briefly each time, and walked a fair amount of the surrounding area. A proper website will eventually appear here then; for now, just:

[ 7/25/09: 3 churches, 2 pages, 5 photos ]

A few of the churches of Magione: not many of them, and not much more than bare photographs.

In the meanwhile, you might find it useful to read the short section of the July 17, 2000 entry of my diary, with another photo, and possibly the even shorter bit on Mar. 7, 2004; for further (and much better) information, see the websites linked in the navigation bar at the bottom of this page.

Frazioni

Like most of the comuni in Italy, Magione 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 Montecolognola and Soccorso, so any other links will be offsite.

Agello • Antria • Borgogiglione • Caligiana • Collesanto • Montecolognola • Monte del Lago • Montemelino • Montesperello • S. Arcangelo • S. Feliciano • S. Savino • Torricella • Villa • Soccorso

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The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)

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