Spoleto

The name may come from the Greek spao-lithos, «detached rock»: the colle Sant'Elia on which the town stands would be the remains of a landslide off Monteluco — but it is a theory nobody has ever confirmed. What is certain is that Spoletium was a Roman colony from 241 BC and stayed loyal to Rome even in its worst year, driving off Hannibal fresh from his victory at Trasimene: from the Torre dell'Olio boiling oil was poured on whoever besieged the gate below, and that gate is still called Fuga, flight. Then the Lombards made it the capital of a duchy reaching as far as Benevento, and two dukes of Spoleto, father and son, even tried to seize the imperial crown.

The Ponte delle Torri strides across the ravine for two hundred and thirty metres at a height of eighty-two, and not even historians can decide whether it is Roman-Lombard or late medieval; Goethe, who passed through in 1786, put it in his Italian Journey. Another Roman bridge, the Sanguinario, lies instead beneath the asphalt of a square, found again in the nineteenth century and visited down a flight of steps. In Piazza del Duomo, Filippo Lippi frescoed his last work. And since 1958, when Gian Carlo Menotti went looking for a town that was a theatre and found this one, the Festival dei Due Mondi has made Spoleto a capital of the arts every summer: the theatre that bears his name — designed by Ireneo Aleandri, the same man as Macerata's Sferisterio — has been a World Heritage site since 2026, together with nine other theatres of central Italy.