Italy Guide
Umbria
Montefalco
MONTEFALCO is a pleasing and intimate medieval village that's home to a superb collection of paintings. Its name, meaning Falcon's Mount, was glorified with the appendage la ringhiera dell'Umbria – "the balcony of Umbria" – a tribute to its wonderful views. It was also the birthplace of eight saints, good going even by Italian standards. Nowadays the town's sleepy rather than holy, with only a stupendously ugly water tower and very slight urban sprawl to take the edge off its medieval appeal.
Using public transport, you can get here by bus from most local towns and villages, including five services daily from Bevagna and eight daily from Perugia.
The cavernous ex-church of San Francesco, off the central Piazza del Comune at Via Ringhiera Umbra 6, is now the Museo Civico di San Francesco (March– May, Sept & Oct daily 10.30am–1pm & 2–6pm; June– Aug daily 10.30am–1pm & 3–7pm, Aug open until 7.30pm; Nov– Feb Tues– Sun 10.30am–1pm & 2.30–5pm; €5), housing the town's big feature, Benozzo Gozzoli's sumptuous fresco cycle on the life of St Francis. With Fra' Angelico, Gozzoli was one of the most prolific and influential Florentine painters to come south and show the backward Umbrians what the Renaissance was all about. Resplendent with colour and detail, the cycle copies many of the ideas and episodes from Giotto's Assisi cycle but, with two hundred years of artistic know-how to draw on, is more sophisticated and more immediately appealing.