In an Umbrian village of a few thousand people, between Perugia and Assisi, is one of the most complete wine museums in the world. It is not a cellar with a tasting at the end: it is a real museum, opened in 1974 by a family of producers inside a seventeenth-century palace, with some twenty rooms telling five thousand years of the relationship between people and the vine. Here wine is looked at, not drunk.
What to see
It begins with Bronze Age finds and Greek and Etruscan vases, with scenes of Dionysus and of banquets painted on the pottery; then come the presses, the vineyard tools, the amphorae and barrels, the transport containers and the measuring systems. One section is given to maiolica: the jugs and tankards of Deruta, made a few kilometres from here, with their lustre decoration.
Then there are the prints and drawings with wine as their subject, from Dürer and Mantegna to the twentieth century, and a room on pharmacopoeia, that is on all the centuries in which wine was a medicine before it was a drink: mortars, stills, recipe books. In the same village, on the same ticket, you can visit the museum of the olive and of oil, built on the same principle.
Visiting
The museum is in the centre of Torgiano, fifteen kilometres from Perugia and as many from Assisi; single ticket or combined with the oil museum, open daily with seasonal hours. An hour and a half for the wine museum, two and a half for both. The village can be walked in a quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Do not skip the pharmacopoeia room, which is usually the one where people quicken their step: it is the part that best explains why wine has crossed five thousand years without ever disappearing, namely because for almost all that time it was considered a cure. Then go out and do the oil museum too: they are two museums on the same subject, that is on how a fruit is turned into something that keeps.