Assisi

For eight centuries Assisi has belonged to the world: the town of saint Francis, patron of Italy, has been a UNESCO site since 2000 and draws millions of pilgrims and travellers to the two-level basilica where Giotto changed painting by telling the saint's life. But the pink town on Monte Subasio is not only its masterpiece: there is Santa Chiara, there is the Roman temple of Minerva still standing on the square with its columns, there is the Rocca Maggiore at the top. And there was a great deal here before Francis: the name is pre-Latin and may mean town of the hawk, Asisium was a Roman municipium, and in 545 the Goths of Totila sacked it.

Its festivals are above all a way of remembering. In May the Calendimaggio takes the town back to the Middle Ages with a contest of songs and processions between the Upper Part and the Lower Part; on the twenty-second of June the Feast of the Vow recalls the time when it was the Saracens who were driven off, and tradition says it was saint Clare who put them to flight; in September the Cavalcata di Satriano retraces, with horses and costumes, the journey the people of Assisi made to Nocera Umbra to fetch Francis, by then dying, so that he could die at home. And one festival set out from here for the whole of Italy: Mother's Day, celebrated for the first time in 1957 by the parish priest of Tordibetto, a hamlet of Assisi. Outside the walls remain the Hermitage of the Carceri in the woods and the basilica of the Angels with the Porziuncola.