Piazza del Popolo is why Todi enters the textbooks: cathedral and three medieval civic palaces face each other across one of Italy's most perfect squares, in balance for eight centuries. Here lies Jacopone, the poet-friar of the laude, rebel and mystic of the thirteenth century.
Outside the walls, the temple of the Consolazione — pure Greek-cross Renaissance, a century in the building — stands in its meadow like an apparition. In the 1990s a University of Kentucky study named Todi an ideal city for liveability: the locals nodded, unruffled. Below, Roman cisterns open to visits; around, Umbria at its most serene.
Near Todi
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
