Every 15 May Gubbio collectively loses its head: the Festa dei Ceri sends three teams racing through the lanes with four-hundred-kilo wooden "candles" on their shoulders, one of Italy's oldest and most overwhelming folk rites. The rest of the year, the grey-stone city remains Umbria's medieval masterpiece: the Palazzo dei Consoli suspended over its hanging square, streets climbing the mountain.
In the museum, the Iguvine Tablets — seven bronze slabs in the ancient Umbrian tongue — are a unique document of pre-Roman Italy. The open "basket" cableway rises to Sant'Ubaldo; at Christmas, the tree of lights drawn on the mountainside holds a Guinness record.
Near Gubbio
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
