Città della Pieve is Perugino's town, and in its cathedral hang two of his canvases: he painted them for the church of the town where he was born, before the people he had grown up with. The church has a very long history, beginning with a building of the fourth or fifth century and passing through a Romanesque and a gothic one.
What to see
What you see today is of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the time when the church became a cathedral: the side chapels and the bell tower beside the building are of that period. Few traces of the older rebuildings remain, but the crypt under the high altar is gothic and stands on the remains of civic buildings of Etruscan and Roman date.
Besides Perugino's works there are paintings by other Umbrian artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought in from the churches of the district. The cathedral stands on the main square, in brick like the whole town, and its unfinished front is one of those façades in which you see a design stopped for lack of money.
Visiting
The cathedral is in piazza Gramsci, in the centre of Città della Pieve; free entry with hours tied to services, and a few minutes away is the oratory with the Adoration of the Magi, Perugino's other work in the town. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Go down into the crypt and count the layers: under a seventeenth-century cathedral there is a gothic crypt, and under that again the walls of Etruscan and Roman houses. Five ages stacked in a single building, and to see them you only have to take a flight of steps that almost nobody takes.