Isn’t this the way an Umbrian hill town should look? Yes. A circular piazza, just the right size, with seven radiating streets, some leading down cobbled lanes into charming neighborhoods of stone cottages with arbors covered with grapevines, tumbling potted plants, and a multihued cat asleep in the street.
The piazza is anchored by a handsome thirteenth-century Palazzo Comunale, town hall, with a bell tower to climb for wide views. Directly across, Teatro San Filippo Neri formerly was a church. What a good fate for unused religious buildings, staging pageants of a different kind. At an arched doorway surrounded by datura plants, I step into the intimate oratory, Santa Maria di Piazza. The apse fresco of the Madonna and Child was painted in 1517 by local boy Francesco Melanzio, whose name you see around town, but the oratory dates back to the beginning of the thirteenth century. Melanzio’s blues are vivid, his Madonna pensive, and off to the left Pope Gregory I holds up a huge communion wafer. I almost didn’t notice the aedicule (small shrine) to the right of the fresco. This niche is a remnant of the older oratory. Along the sides, the tourist office has mounted copies of many important paintings in Montefalco. If churches are closed, you can still see what you’re missing.
Via Goffredo Mameli drops down to the frescoed Porta Sant’Agostino, the main entrance into Montefalco. Along the way, enotece for the tasting of the local sagrantino wine, textile shops selling pastel linens in traditional patterns, and trattorie, including our favorite, Olevm. On this street, it’s easy to pass right by Chiesa di Sant’Agostino. I love the haphazard arches and windows inside and the faded and fragmentary frescoes, almost all “attributed to” someone or by unknown Umbrian painters of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Via Ringhiera Umbra, off the piazza, takes you to the museum and church of San Francesco. Others lead you to panoramic views. No wonder this town is known as “the balcony of Umbria.” We identify the compelling towns of Trevi, Spello, Spoleto, and Assisi, scaling distant forested hills, shining white against green like fine two-color drawings of themselves. When I look at them, I always feel a surge of hope. Maybe this comes from the biblical “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
MONTEFALCO IS ONE of my favorite towns. We discovered it early in our years in Italy, arriving with two friends at dark in winter. Ed wanted to taste sagrantino—the grape is indigenous to Montefalco—then mostly unknown outside its sphere. The town was not the lively place it now is. One light across the deserted piazza, an open door with barrels of wine inside. No one home. We sat down at a rustic table and waited. Finally, a scruffy man in old wool ambled in and gave us a glass of the “little sacred wine.” He’d been playing cards in the bar. I thought the tannins had tied my tongue in a knot. The man laughed and gave us another taste, an aged sagrantino, mellow and deep, with just enough tannin to make me sit up straight.
“Smart wine,” Ed remarked. “The complexity makes you think. Makes you want to analyze, talk about it.”
We bought a bottle. Arnaldo Caprai, it said. We have been drinking those wines ever since. We’ve had lunches at the vineyard, tasting their passito, dessert wine made from first drying the mature grapes in the sun, and their vintages. A first sip always brings back the image of the lighted doorway across the piazza, a bare bulb casting shadows on our faces, the dark crimson wine pouring into our glasses.
WE CAN NOW buy sagrantino in Cortona, even in North Carolina. Still we come to Montefalco for its beauty and major art holdings, especially for the captivating frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. When our French friend, Veronique, worked on the restoration years ago, we were able to climb the scaffolding and see faces and details up close. How cold she was in winter, all bundled up, painting on fingernails and earlobes, and cleaning faces with vile-smelling potions. Now the frescoes are in their glory again. The museum attached to the church displays rooms of paintings by unknown artists. Powerful paintings, crucified Christ in wood and tempera, another devastating Crucifixion painted on a board mounted with a carved sculpture of bleeding Christ on the cross. Disturbing and weighty. Who gets remembered, whose works? Many of these pieces rival or surpass others by artists whose names are well known, hung in city galleries. Being from a remote place, not producing a body of work, not known by those who could promote you, that was the fate of Painter from Spoleto, 1280; Umbrian Painter, fourteenth century; Circle of Niccolò di Liberatore; and others.
Before the museum rooms lead into the church, we visit the lapidary rooms down in the crypt. Local archeological finds include several Roman funerary stele from the first century. (Some were discovered just outside town at San Fortunato, where we are going later.) The prize in this room: a white marble Hercules, 117 centimeters tall from the first century B.C. or early first century A.D. Although found here, its provenance is unknown. He is holding the skin of the Nemean lion, his first challenge in obtaining forgiveness for murdering his own children in a fit of pique. Since the skin couldn’t be pierced, he strangled the raging lion and created a coat and a helmet from the head. He holds a club in one hand and an apple in the other, a symbol of one of his other labors. A mysterious hello from ancient history.
ONLY THREE OTHER people are in the church. What luck. Soon they leave and we have Signor Gozzoli to ourselves. On the back wall, we find Perugino’s sweet nativity against a bucolic landscape background. It’s painted in a coved space perhaps six meters high. Above the nativity, God looks down benevolently and at the top, the start of everything—an Annunciation, with the angel in soft corals and blues.
There is much to see along the walls. Gozzoli’s chapel of San Girolamo with many weird clouds that look like splats of whipped cream. Other chapels depict the Annunciation, Assumption, and lives of Saints Bernardine and Antonio. In the choir chapel, we arrive at the frescoes of the life of San Francesco. The space is crowded with scenes on three levels and on the vaulted ceiling. From left to right, follow the narrative of Francesco’s life from birth in a manger setting like that of Jesus, to youth when he renounced his family’s wealth, meetings with saints, a dream, expulsion of devils from Arezzo, and then the familiar stories of preaching to the birds—thirteen different kinds mill around his feet in attentive postures. In the same panel, Francesco blesses Montefalco. The scenes reinforce the parallels between Jesus and Francesco. The fait accompli occurs when Francesco receives the stigmata, the only saint to be so honored. Then, death.
The work is dense. Though each panel looks packed with detail, the story is clear and explicit. Art! A holy ferment of creativity in this small town centuries ago. The museum and church are immense treasure troves, worth any detour.
AND NOW, PRANZO. Umbrian food is hearty everywhere, but especially over in Norcia, where every part of the pig is celebrated. The local lentils taste like the earth smells. Big unsalted breads, full-bodied olive oil, the old-world bean cicerchia, farro, chestnuts, and fava. Truffles! This is the season. We’re at Olevm, where three tables are squeezed in downstairs and upstairs, slightly more spacious, another few. Everything homemade. On the way in, I spot the pie-sized chocolate budino on the counter, trays of fresh pasta, and my favorite cheese bread with walnuts.
The young couple next to us drinks two bottles of wine with a plethora of courses, all scarfed up quickly. We admire their fortitude. She giggles. He has a nose ring that in profile looks like something dripping from his nostrils. Don’t look.
What could be finer than just-pressed olive oil on bruschetta spread with black truffles? Especially when paired with a glass of sagrantino, followed by zuppa di cicerchia, dense puréed soup made with a bean that looks like an irregular little pebble and tastes like time itself (similar to chickpeas). And, ah, a basket of breads. The house sagrantino is Montefalco Sagrantino 2013 Montioni. Quite a house wine! I love semifreddo desserts but can’t manage theirs, which is made with sagrantino. I guess the owner saw my admiring look at the chocolate budino on the way in. She cuts us each a sliver of this delicate pudding cake as we pay. A mighty espresso sends us on our way.
Some shops, including Tessitura Pardi and Tessuto Artistico Umbro—the linen ones—have stayed open during the pausa. Textiles are a major weakness of mine and the holidays will be upon us soon, so I have a good reason to go in. I am drawn to the dusky fresco colors of the Umbrian designs. I select placemats and napkins in old gold and a stack of kitchen towels to give to dinner party hosts. There’s a yellow tablecloth like a skirt in a renaissance painting. I don’t buy it but I can always come back.
BENOZZO GOZZOLI PAINTED his first four frescoes in the Chiesa di San Fortunato, just outside town. Some of the funeral stele we saw in the museum were found on this ancient holy site founded in the fifth century, and paintings in the museum were moved from here. We walk into a small cloister. The church is closed. A smiling priest gets out of his car and walks up to us with his hand out. He’s new here, transferred from Israel. Not only is the church closed, it’s not going to open anytime in the foreseeable future. Seismic, he explains. Recent earthquakes will have Umbria sorting out possible damage for a long time. We do get to see a chapel in the cloister, charmingly painted by Tiberio d’Assisi in faded green, lavender, saffron, and buff. A resurrection with Christ emerging from a pink sepulcher. Two lithe and delicate angels, as lovely as Botticelli’s, accompanying San Francesco on a bucolic walk. He already has the stigmatas but is carrying a bouquet of flowers. In medallions above, two martyrs are shown with knives plunged into their shoulder and head.
Sebastiano must be the most popular subject among all saints. Here, he’s pale, tall and blond, pure frontal nudity except for a wisp of lavender scarf tied around the strategic spot. He survived the arrow attack. Infections from arrows were thought to cause plague. Since he lived, he became the saint people beseeched when plague settled on their towns. The priest doesn’t know the painter, he says. He’s new, he repeats. “Tiberio d’Assisi,” I tell him. We leave an offering but not enough to restore San Fortunato.
DRIVING AWAY, WE stop several times to photograph undulating hills planted with grapevines, delicate plumes of gold poplars, lindens turned flamboyant yellow, even evergreen oaks and ilex leaves gone to sepia from the summer drought. The grapevines blaze dark, russet red, embers with sparks of fire, the color of sagrantino.
NOTE:
“A city set on a hill…” Matthew 5:14, English Standard Version of the Bible.