Assisi

The earliest known people of Assisi were the Umbri. After the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BC the Romans took control of central Italy and built the municipium of Asisium on terraces up Monte Subasio; its walls, its forum — now Piazza del Comune — a theatre, an amphitheatre and the Temple of Minerva survive. Tradition says bishop Rufino converted the town to Christianity in 238. Totila's Ostrogoths destroyed most of it in 545, and it then passed into the Lombard and Frankish Duchy of Spoleto.

By the 11th century Assisi was an independent Ghibelline commune, constantly at war with Guelph Perugia. In one of those battles, at Collestrada, a young Giovanni di Bernardone was taken prisoner — the start of the path that led him, as St Francis, to renounce the world and found the Order of Friars Minor in 1208. Clare of Assisi joined him in founding the Order of Poor Ladies. After Francis's canonisation the basilica was built from 1228, and the town grew beyond its Roman walls. It later fell under Perugia, a series of despots and the popes, and the Black Death of 1348 brought a deep decline.

In the Second World War the Church's Assisi Network hid Jews in the town, and a German medical officer made it a hospital city, which helped save it from destruction; British troops entered on 17 June 1944. On 26 September 1997 an earthquake brought down part of the vault of the upper basilica, killing four people; the basilica reopened in less than two years. In 2000 the Franciscan sites were listed by UNESCO.

Everything in Assisi returns to St Francis, patron of Italy alongside St Catherine of Siena, remembered far beyond the Church as a lover of nature who, in legend, preached to the birds. The town was also home to St Clare, St Agnes of Assisi, St Rufinus and other saints, and it is the final resting place of St Carlo Acutis. Pilgrims, religious orders and groups devoted to peace and interfaith dialogue gather here, and the town is the end point of the Perugia–Assisi peace march.

The basilica of San Francesco is one of the great treasuries of Italian painting, where Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti worked. The two papal basilicas of Assisi, San Francesco and Santa Maria degli Angeli, the only ones outside Rome, also lent their names to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Assisi embroidery, a counted-thread technique in which the background is stitched and the motifs are only outlined, takes its name from the town, where needlework of this kind has been practised since the 13th century.

The civic calendar peaks with Calendimaggio in early May, when the upper and lower parts of the town, the parte de sopra and parte de sotto, compete in a re-enactment of medieval and Renaissance life with processions, music, theatre, crossbows and flag-waving. In early October the feast of St Francis brings solemn ceremonies and crowds.

About 27,000 people live in the municipality, which reaches from the old town down to the plain. Santa Maria degli Angeli, the largest settlement on the plain, had about 6,700 residents at the 2001 census, and is home to the basilica and the railway station.

Religious tourism dominates the economy. Hotels, pilgrim houses, restaurants and shops selling religious goods and crafts line the streets, and friars, nuns and pilgrim groups are an everyday sight. Assisi Performing Arts and other groups stage concerts and cultural events. One group has restored an 11th-century room and fitted it with altars to the world's religions, a sign of the town's place in interfaith dialogue. Visitors who stay overnight see the town at its quietest, once day visitors have gone.

Recovery from the 1997 earthquakes has been remarkable, though restoration work has continued for years. The town is governed by an elected mayor and council; Valter Stoppini was elected mayor in May 2025 with about 52 per cent of the vote.

Umbrian cooking is simple, built on the flavour of its ingredients: pork and cured meats, above all from the Norcia area, truffles, and extra-virgin olive oil, which goes into almost every recipe. Strangozzi, also called stringozzi, are long, thick strips of eggless pasta, traditionally rolled by hand from soft-wheat flour and water and cut into narrow ribbons.

Torta al testo, a speciality of the Perugia area, is a round flatbread of flour, water, bicarbonate and salt, cooked on a round cast-iron plate called a testo, from which it takes its name. Porchetta is a boneless pork roast cooked over wood for hours with its fat and skin still on, sometimes stuffed with liver and wild fennel. The town's own sweet is rocciata, a baked rolled pastry recognised as a traditional product of Umbria and the Marche and known by that name around Assisi, Foligno, Spello and Nocera Umbra.

The wines of the valley include Montefalco Sagrantino, made entirely from the Sagrantino grape native to Umbria and grown around Montefalco across the plain, and the region's olive oil is used in almost every dish.