As a boy, C.S. Lewis found this town's Latin name in a classical atlas — Narnia — and underlined it: decades later, the world beyond the wardrobe took its name from here. The real Narni, 20,054 residents perched above the Nera river gorge, holds its own: the Bridge of Augustus (27 BC) bewitched Grand Tour travellers and Corot's brushes.
Beneath the streets lies Narni Underground, rediscovered in 1979: a frescoed twelfth-century church and an Inquisition cell scratched with prisoners' graffiti. Each May the Corsa all'Anello ring joust turns the clocks back to the fourteenth century, and a marker just outside town stakes a claim worth a selfie: the exact geographical centre of Italy.
Near Narni
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
