Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to Tuscany and Umbria (Travel Guide eBook)

This Rough Guide is one of a new generation of informative and easy-to-use travel-guide ebooks that guarantees you make the most of your trip. An essential tool for pre-trip planning, it also makes a great travel companion when youre on the road.

From the section.

Detailed area maps feature in the guide chapters and are also listed in the , accessible from the table of contents. Depending on your hardware, you can double-tap on the maps to see larger-scale versions, or select different scales. The screen-lock function on your device is recommended when viewing enlarged maps. Make sure you have the latest software updates, too.

Throughout the guide, weve flagged up our favourite places a perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric caf, a special restaurant with the author pick icon . You can select your own favourites and create a personalized itinerary by bookmarking the sights, venues and activities that are of interest, giving you the quickest possible access to everything youll need for your time away.

Tuscany and Umbria harbour the classic landscapes of Italy, familiar from a thousand Renaissance paintings, with their backdrop of medieval hill-towns, rows of cypresses, vineyards and olive groves, and artfully sited villas and farmhouses. Its a stereotype that has long held an irresistible attraction for northern Europeans. Shelley referred to Tuscany as a paradise of exiles, and ever since his time the English, in particular, have seen the region as an ideal refuge from a sun-starved and overcrowded homeland.

The outsiders perspective may be distorted, but the central provinces especially in Tuscany are indeed the essence of Italy in many ways. The national language evolved from Tuscan dialect, a supremacy ensured by Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy in the vernacular of his birthplace, Florence. Other great Tuscan writers of the period Petrarch and Boccaccio reinforced its status, and in the nineteenth century Manzoni came here to purge his vocabulary of any impurities while working on The Betrothed, the most famous of all Italian novels. But what makes this area pivotal to the culture not just of Italy but of all Europe is, of course, the Renaissance, that extraordinarily creative era that takes its name from another Tuscan, Giorgio Vasari, who wrote in the sixteenth century of the rebirth of the arts with the humanism of Giotto and his successors.

Nowadays Tuscany and Umbria are among the wealthiest regions of the modern Italian state, a prosperity founded partly on agriculture and tourism, but largely on their industrial centres, which are especially conspicuous in the Arno valley. Nonetheless, both Tuscany and Umbria are predominantly rural, with great tracts of land still looking much as they did half a millennium ago. Just as the hill-towns mould themselves to the summits, the terraces of vines follow the lower contours of the hills and open fields spread across the broader valleys, forming a distinctive balance between the natural and human world.

Mercato Centrale, Florence

Florence was the most active centre of the Renaissance: almost every eminent artistic figure from Giotto onwards is represented here in an unrivalled gathering of churches, galleries and museums. But although Florence tends to take the limelight today, the longstanding rivalries between the towns of Tuscany and Umbria ensured that pictures and palaces were sponsored by everyone who could afford them. Exquisite Renaissance works adorn almost every place of any size, from the coast to the Apennine slopes of eastern Umbria, while many towns can boast artistic projects every bit as ambitious as those to be seen in Florence the stunning fresco cycles in Arezzo (by Piero della Francesca), Orvieto (Luca Signorelli), Siena (Pinturicchio), San Gimignano (Benozzo Gozzoli), Montefalco (Gozzoli again), Assisi (Giotto and others), Perugia (Perugino) and Prato (Fra Filippo Lippi) are just a selection of the regions riches.

And of course the art of the Renaissance did not spring out of thin air: both Tuscany and Umbria can boast a cultural lineage that stretches back to the time of Charlemagne and beyond. Lucca has some of the most handsome Romanesque buildings in Europe, and Pisa is another city whose heyday came in the Middle Ages its Campo dei Miracoli, with the Leaning Tower, is one of Europes most brilliant monumental ensembles. Sienas red-brick medieval cityscape makes a refreshing contrast with the darker tones of Florence, while a tour through Umbria can seem like a procession of magnificent ancient hill-towns. The attractions of Assisi (birthplace of St Francis), Spoleto and the busy provincial capital of Perugia are well known, but other Umbrian towns such as Gubbio, Bevagna and Todi retain plentiful evidence of their ancient past, too.