Norcia

Norcia is a hard town to write about without mentioning the earthquakes, because the earthquakes are, quite literally, still visible. In October 2016, a series of major tremors collapsed the Basilica di San Benedetto, leaving only its Romanesque facade standing amid rubble — the rest of the church, along with much of the historic center’s stonework, came down or was badly damaged. When I visited, scaffolding still wrapped whole streets, and the basilica facade stood alone against open sky, propped and braced, a strange monument to both the disaster and the town’s refusal to let it be the whole story. Norcia has been rebuilding, patiently, the way it has rebuilt after earthquakes for centuries — the town sits in one of the most seismically active corners of the Apennines and has been leveled and restored more than once since the Middle Ages.

The Saint and the Butchers

Norcia’s other claim to fame long predates the earthquakes: it’s the birthplace of Saint Benedict, the sixth-century founder of Western monasticism, whose Rule shaped monastic life across Europe for a thousand years and whose twin sister, Santa Scolastica, is honored here too. The basilica that fell in 2016 was built over the traditional site of his family home. But walk the streets today and you’ll notice the town’s more earthbound reputation just as fast: Norcia gave its name to an entire trade. In Italian, a norcino is a pork butcher, a word derived directly from this town, because Norcia’s mountain artisans became so associated with the craft of curing meat — prosciutto, salami, the region’s famous black truffle-studded salumi — that the skill and the place became synonymous. Shop windows down Corso Sertorio still hang with cured legs of ham and coils of sausage, and the smell of aged pork and woodsmoke follows you down the street.

Mountains, Lentils, and the Piano Grande

Norcia sits at the edge of the Monti Sibillini, a national park of jagged limestone peaks that ring the town on nearly every side, and just beyond them lies the Piano Grande, a vast high mountain plain where, for a few weeks each spring, wildflowers and lentil blooms turn the flat valley floor into stripes of red, purple, and yellow. Norcia’s own lentils — small, thin-skinned, grown without irrigation on the plain’s poor soil — are protected by an IGP designation and turn up in every trattoria in town, usually with a sausage from a shop two doors down. I ate a bowl of them with barely any seasoning at all and understood immediately why nobody bothers dressing them up.

When to go: Late June to early July for the lentil and wildflower bloom on the Piano Grande — it’s genuinely spectacular and still under most tourists’ radar. Autumn brings black truffle season, when the whole town seems to smell faintly of it.