Spoleto
"I walked across an aqueduct built in the 14th century and felt entirely unsentimental about modernity."
Spoleto is the kind of town that rewards people who read the map wrong. I arrived looking for a bar and ended up at the Roman theater instead, which dates to the first century BC and is still used for performances during the summer festival. A cat was sitting on the stage. Nothing was stopping anyone from sitting in the stone seats, so I did for a while, watching the cat not perform, thinking about the people who had watched things in this same bowl for two thousand years.
Roman Foundations and What Survived
The Romans built Spoleto as a strategic colony to hold central Italy in the third century BC, and the bones are still visible: a Roman house under the Piazza della Libertà, the arch of Drusus spanning a street so narrow you nearly miss it, the amphitheater converted into a military barracks by the Lombards who came after. The Duomo is Romanesque with a 12th-century mosaic on its façade and a frescoed apse by Filippo Lippi — who died here in 1469 and is buried inside, which is one of those facts that makes a place feel specifically Italian, the dead artists staying put.
The Gorge and the Bridge
The Ponte delle Torri is an aqueduct that spans a gorge 230 meters wide and 80 meters above the Tessino stream. It was built in the 14th century on Roman foundations and it is, by any rational measure, excessive. I walked across it twice — once to get to the forested hillside on the other side, and once back — and both times I stopped in the middle to look down at the stream threading through beech trees far below. The walk continues from the far end into the Monteluco forest, which is dense, quiet, and smells of earth and fungus in October.
The Festival dei Due Mondi
Spoleto’s annual arts festival, held every June and July, was founded in 1958 by Gian Carlo Menotti and has never entirely shaken its American-modernist DNA. The opera, theater, and dance performances happen in Roman theaters, medieval churches, and the ducal palace courtyard — venues so beautiful they make mediocre art watchable. I’ve never been during the festival itself, but the town’s relationship with performance bleeds into the off-season: the piazzas have a stage-set quality, the sight lines are good from everywhere.
Eating in the Lower City
The upper city gets the tourists; the lower neighborhoods feel like a real provincial town with a weekly market and bars full of locals eating tramezzini at eleven in the morning. I had lunch at a place near the amphitheater that specialized in umbrichelli with truffle cream and a carafe of local Trebbiano Spoletino — a white wine with a slight oxidized quality I initially resisted and then kept drinking. The owner explained the grape with the confidence of someone who has been defending a local variety for a long time and knows he’s winning.
When to go: June for the Festival dei Due Mondi if you book months ahead. September and October for empty streets and truffle season. April is ideal — the gorge runs green, the tourists are sparse, and the restaurants haven’t pivoted to festival pricing yet. Avoid mid-July, when the festival is at peak and accommodation is scarce.