Perugia
— the hour the whole town walks the same street.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Umbria, set on a hill that has been a city since the Etruscans. The main street, Corso Vannucci, runs a single straight kilometre from the Fontana Maggiore to the open view over the valley, and every evening the whole town walks it end to end. The pale stone holds the afternoon light a long time after the sun is gone. In July the jazz runs late in the piazzas; in October the air smells of chocolate. Nobody hurries here. They have had two thousand years to learn the pace.
Perugia, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Perugia is the capital of Umbria, the only Italian region with neither a sea coast nor a foreign border, set on a hilltop at 493 metres above the Tiber valley in the centre of the country. The historic core sits where the Etruscans built one of their twelve confederate cities; it was first recorded as Perusia around 310 BC. Roughly 162,000 people now live across the old hill and the modern town below it, linked by escalators that climb through the Rocca Paolina and by a small automated minimetrò. Assisi stands across the valley to the east, and Florence and Rome are each about two hours away by road or rail.
The stone is the oldest thing here and the most worked. The Arch of Augustus, the city's northern gate, is Etruscan at its base and Roman in its upper courses, built in the third century BC and standing yet. At the head of the main piazza, the Fontana Maggiore was completed around 1280 by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, its two basins carved with fifty panels of the months, the zodiac, and scenes from Aesop's fables. Above it rises the Palazzo dei Priori, one of the great medieval town halls of Italy, which holds the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria and the Collegio del Cambio. Perugino frescoed those walls around 1500; he is the painter most often named as the young Raphael's master.
Perugia keeps two seasons the rest of Italy travels for. Umbria Jazz, running since 1973, fills the piazzas and the Giardini Carducci for ten days each July, with free stages along Corso Vannucci and ticketed nights at the Arena Santa Giuliana. In mid-October the city turns to chocolate for Eurochocolate, begun in 1994, in the town that has made Perugina since 1907 and gave the world the Baci, the foil-wrapped hazelnut kiss with a love note folded inside. Between the festivals, much of the crowd on the street is students; the University of Perugia was founded in 1308, and the University for Foreigners has taught Italian to the world for a century.