| |
To open a window in Umbria means to admire with spellbound eyes a picture where a wise painter has dosed all the tones of the rainbow, the unlikely blue of the sky, the green sweet hills where the sunflowers sprout yellow and dreamy , the rows of the grapevines punctuated by gilded and purplish bunches, the intense or soft blue of the lake Trasimeno, the white flowers of the almond trees in spring, the olive trees with their tender silvered leaves, the fields of wheat where among the green ears there grow red the poppies, the grey coloured marbles articulated in thousand tones, from the rosy white to the pearly one, to the turtle dove and thousand other hues that change with the seasons, dressing again this magic earth of other colours and other legends.
And legendary is this earth, whose name originates from the ancient indo-european people, the Osco-Umbri, that lived here quite a lot of centuries before Christ. Its history loses itself therefore in the folds of a distant past and it crosses worlds and civilizations by now lost, the Etruscans, the Romans, the Barbarians. Umbria sees the birth of Christianity and welcomes the first Christian churches , then there came the Middle Ages with the birth of the Communes and the appearing of castles, of villages and towns that climb up as if on a staircase the slopes of the hills, they cluster on their top or lie down in the green valleys. And these two, mysticism and action, are the dominant elements of a land between holiness and strength, torn between the dreamy and mysterious sweetness of its landscapes and the austere towers of the medieval towns, between Saints and men of arms.
To visit Umbria is a slow walk, a trip going back in time not only to find again traces of the ancient past, but also values of ancient traditions preserved among the tortuous alleys and the proud bell towers of the hundred Communes that compose it. A walk that will take up all of our senses: to visit Umbria is not only to see it, but also to touch it, to listen to its silences, those of the isolated suburbs made silent by the obscurity or those of the fields in the hours when the heat extinguishes even the song of the birds or those of the narrow alleys covered with snow that reduces every rustle, or to savour the perfumes and the tastes of it, perfumes of bread, of earth, of wine, the neat tastes of its cooking where the insipid and the tasty wisely are blended together.
|
|
