Citta di Castello

We almost skipped Citta di Castello. Lia had circled it on the map because a friend in Perugia kept saying “you have to see the Burri,” and I’ll admit I went along more out of curiosity than conviction. Then we walked in through the old gate and I understood why the guidebooks undersell it: this is a town built on the bones of the Roman Tifernum Tiberinum, but what you actually feel walking its grid of streets is the Renaissance — orderly, deliberate, fortified with the kind of confidence that only comes from having Antonio da Sangallo the Elder consult on your walls. There’s nothing accidental about the way the town sits in the Upper Tiber Valley. It was planned, and six centuries later it still reads that way.

We spent our first morning at the Pinacoteca Comunale, tucked inside the Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, and I stood in front of an early painted standard by Raphael — a native son here — for far longer than Lia’s patience technically allowed. There’s something disarming about seeing a young artist’s hand before it became “Raphael” in the art-history sense, still working things out, still local. Signorelli and Ghirlandaio hang nearby, and the palazzo itself, all frescoed ceilings and cool stone corridors, was worth the visit even without the paintings.

But it was the Fondazione Burri that stayed with me longest. We went to Palazzo Albizzini first, then crossed town to the Seccatoi del Tabacco — the old tobacco-drying sheds, this cavernous industrial space now filled with Alberto Burri’s enormous, cracked, burned, and torn canvases. Burri was born in this town in 1915, and seeing his work installed in a building that once dried tobacco leaves felt exactly right: raw material transformed by heat and time, in a space that used to do precisely that for a living. Lia, who usually finds contemporary art a hard sell, went quiet in there in a way I don’t often see.

In the evening we found a table outside near the old fortifications, ordered a bottle of something local, and talked about how strange it is that a single small town can hold a Roman street plan, a Renaissance defensive wall, an early Raphael, and a modernist who scorched canvas for a living — all within a ten-minute walk. When to go: we’d happily return in late December for the Umbria Jazz Winter festival, when the town apparently hums after dark, but for wandering the streets and museums at an unhurried pace, spring or early autumn is the gentler, sun-warmed choice.