Gubbio in Umbria

This is my fourth blog post describing my trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy this past July. My last post recounted our two days in Ravenna. Next stop was Gubbio, in Umbria.
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Umbria is quite craggy above its little rivers. The Via Flaminia, the ancient main road from Ariminum to Rome, bypassed the important Umbrian city of Iguvium, located on a defensible slope above a well-enclosed mountain valley. The modern name of this city is Gubbio.

The Via Flaminia in Roman Times. (Wikipedia.)
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Under the empire, Iguvium was safe and luxurious, a rather elite spot as evidenced by the remains of the massive classical-era theater.  

Gubbio. Roman theater on the left. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Iguvium, before the Roman conquest, was Ikuvium, capital of the Umbrians. After the fall of the Etruscan League and the Roman conquest of Tuscany, the Umbrians were the next to be absorbed militarily by Rome. Like written Etruscan, the Umbrian written language remains undeciphered. The longest known texts of Umbrian writing are the bronze Eugubine tablets from Ikuvium. After the Roman victory, Ikuvium kept its population and its name. 

Gubbio and environs seem to have been prosperous in medieval times. It is said that the city sponsored 1,000 knights for the First Crusade, and the knights of Gubbio legendarily recaptured the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A “knight” as a unit included at the minimum not just an armored warrior on horseback, but also a squire or dogsbody, a stable hand for the horse, and a man-at-arms. Gubbio's 1,000 knights, if an accurate number, would represent a 4,000 man expedition, which is larger than a modern American infantry brigade. That seems a lot for such a little place, but Gubbio was nearly continuously at war throughout the medieval and Renaissance era.

​Some centuries after the First Crusade, Gubbio warded off incorporation by Florence, but was ultimately incorporated by the Papal States. Family alliances came and went, but through it all Gubbio remained a tough nut to crack. Medieval/Renaissance Gubbio was a walled fortress city, a stony maze of streets and towers with no weak spots. Considerable sections of the walls remain today.

In Gubbio: inside the walls, a street runs under the medieval ducal palace of the Gabriellis toward the Renaissance ducal palace of the Montefeltros. 
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The ducal palace and its piazza. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).
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View from the piazza (Photo by Alex Mawyer).
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Gubbio — close quarters. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).
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The modern steed. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).
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Climbing to the top of Gubbio.
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Gubbio from above — along the upper wall.
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Olives above.

When archery wasn’t a sport. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).
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Essential Gubbio — walled terraces.

​Gubbio is a gastronomic capital of food and wine.

A free ad: drink this. Fly as far and as fast as you have to, to drink it.

 We were especially smitten with the wild boar sausages. ​

But the prince of epicurean Gubbio is the truffle. Until Gubbio, I did not know what a truffle (tartufo in Italian) actually was. Real truffles are not a faintly flavorful dried dust, or something hinted at in a tincture of olive oil. The key to truffles is life itself — you have to eat the truffle alive. Their fragrance, the weird alien density of the fragrance, suggests some powerful esters. A single live tartufo will fill a room with wit and humor, like a great raconteur, and leave everyone within nose both amused and delighted. But a whole basket of tartufi will leave you on the outside looking in, as the funghi communicate with each other and ignore you. The effect is like a helpless drunkenness. The truffle caves where masses of tartufi are held seem drug-like in their intensity.

Basket of living truffles. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).
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Truffles on beef carpacchio — like eating poetry!
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When, after an already colorful and adventurous young life, Saint Francis was thrown out of Assisi in exile and disgrace, he fled to Gubbio. At the time, Gubbio was troubled by an abnormally huge wolf, the Wolf of Gubbio, who is said to have eaten well over a hundred persons. The local farmers lived in understandable terror of being next. But Saint Francis called this wolf to Jesus, and the wolf stopped eating people and became a pet. It might have been the first of his many miracles, as a saint.

Saint Francis redeems and pardons the Wolf of Gubbio.
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Late in the afternoon we found the Chiesa di San Francesco, completed in 1256, and now refreshingly almost free of the baroque, although the edge of some such is plainly visible at the left in the photo below. There are also the scraped-at remains of some very early remarkable Francis Cult frescos.

Chiesa di San Francesco.

Early Franciscan fresco.
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During a 19th century restoration of this church, the bones of a huge wolf were found under the altar. These were reburied in the churchyard, with no marker since the wolf, although a Christian, was also still an animal.  This rings true to me. The Wolf of Gubbio may have frightened more people than it ate and Saint Francis was neither the first nor the last person to tame a wolf, so I find it easier to believe this story than to disbelieve it. Some have observed, on a more intellectual plane, that this foundational Franciscan legend is a narrative inversion of the Roman legend of the wolf that parented Romulus and Remus. We may make what we can of it or let it pass. There probably aren’t any wolves left in Umbria anyway.

In my next post I'll discuss Carsulae and Nemi, and some other thoroughly untouristy spots. Here, then, is as good a place as any to say something about the curse of tourism. Yes, tourism is a sort of curse. Of course people would come to Gubbio just for the truffles and wine and boar, both to eat and to carry away and eat later. That is actually commerce, however, and not tourism. The thing spills over when people come specifically to walk around and look at the view. The resulting hotels, restaurants, stores and gift shops quickly come to dominate the local economy. This is a mixed blessing. It preserves local crafts that might not survive otherwise except as fine art, for instance the technically complex and expensive faience ware of Gubbio. It helps pay for preservation. But these visitors are strangers. If the visitors become the point of the place, the the result is commercial dilution. One can hardly describe this as a tension; it is more in the nature of a relaxation, as the polis with its generations-long centered identity succumbs to the cosmopolis and its more diffuse values, and things that are real risk becoming merely quaint. 

Of course, as a tourist myself, who am I to pontificate on these matters concerning places far from home. Walking the cobbles of Gubbio, I meditated on the contradictions. 

Paradise if we only knew it.
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What Gubbio might be without its tourists can still be loosely imagined. The locals have been invaded but not displaced. Maybe this is also what happened when the Romans came. By comparison, Belluno seemed undiscovered in the tourism sense, a Rough Guide sort of locality, while Venice was all but inundated by its tourist tide. Ravenna was a political capital for centuries in the classical Mediterranean world, and a cultural capital ever since, but the reliquarian past does not define Ravenna. In the summer of 2017 Alex and I found only a thin scattering of tourists in the ruins, while the now of Ravenna was crowded with thoroughly modern young shoppers and diners, designers, artists, students, musicians, and more besides — in no particular order, but ganging up rather thickly around the main gelato stands.

Gubbio seemed very different from the other places we had visited — far up on its mountain, still holding on to an age-old interior self. The Great Outside has found it, but not overwhelmed it.

Twilight settles in — The tourists leave and the locals come out. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).