Gubbio

Every fifteenth of May Gubbio collectively loses its head: the Festa dei Ceri sends three teams running through the alleys with wooden machines of four hundred kilos on their shoulders, in one of the oldest and most overwhelming popular rites in Italy. The statuettes of the three saints that go on top of the Ceri — Ubaldo, George and Anthony Abbot — are kept in a church built, tradition says, where the cave of Saint Francis's wolf once was: inside are the stone on which the pact between the saint and the beast is said to have been made, and the lid of the sarcophagus where the wolf is said to be buried. The wolf has been argued over for centuries — some hold he was a bandit reconciled with the town — but at Gubbio the grave is there.

Francis did not merely pass through here: he came to take refuge after leaving his father's house, taken in by the Spadalonga family, and it was living among the poor and the lepers of Gubbio that his life truly changed. The town, though, is far older: it was called Ikuvium, and in 1456 the comune bought seven bronze tablets found shortly before near the Roman theatre. These are the Iguvine Tables, written in the Umbrian, Latin and Etruscan alphabets but always in the Umbrian language, and for Giacomo Devoto they are the most important ritual text of all classical antiquity: nothing like them exists in Latin or Greek, and to find anything comparable you must go to the literatures of the East. In 1151 eleven cities led by Perugia attacked Gubbio to wipe it out, and Gubbio beat them: the credit went to bishop Ubaldo, and not only by miracle — in those centuries the bishop was also the city's military commander. Then, in 1384, the people of Gubbio rebelled against another bishop who had made himself their lord, and to be rid of him handed themselves over to the Montefeltro: they lost their title of free comune and gained a long spell of peace, and the palazzo dei Consoli. The basket cableway climbs to Sant'Ubaldo; at Christmas, the tree drawn on the mountainside is a world record.