Umbria in May - Perugia

The ‘Domenica al Museo’ event - state-run museums and other attractions are free for the first Sunday in the month - has started again, after being interrupted for Covid, and we found a couple of the last free tickets available for Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia at 8.30 a.m. It means another early start, although I set my alarm for 6 a.m. instead of 5 a.m., so it is a slight improvement.

Starting off so early also means fresh morning light and no traffic as we speed through the countryside to Perugia. After some indecision, we find a space for our car near the Cupa car park which is free at the weekend. From here, there are escalators which take us up to the historical centre. The last few hundred metres to Palazzo Priori is still uphill along the narrow paved streets still littered with Saturday night rubbish, but the visual impact as we arrive in Piazza IV Novembre, is guaranteed. It’s about 8.15, so still few people around, and a beautiful day and the pale stone and pink inserts of the cathedral and 13th century fountain with carvings of agricultural, and other, scenes, are charming.

There’s some confusion at the entrance to the Galleria, especially at the obligatory lockers where nobody can get their heads around the instructions after the early morning start. Eventually we are ready and I go up the wide staircase to the 3rd floor, while Andrea, to save his knee, takes the lift. 

There is a temporary exhibition: “Il meglio maestro d’Italia. Perugino nel suo tempo” about the famous painter Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci who was born in Perugia. The exhibition includes seventy works, by Perugini and others, all painted before 1504, the year in which he was working on two commissions that mark the highest point of his career: the Struggle between Love and Chastity, usually in the Louvre in Paris, and above all the Marriage of the Virgin, nowadays in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen (France). We are among the first visitors but the small rooms, crammed with beautiful paintings, soon fill up, and the mass of people, some coughing, is off-putting so we don’t spend as much time in there as perhaps we would have liked. 

The rest of the Galleria is better, enormous rooms, few people, paintings well spaced, by the time we come out it is nearly 11 o’clock. It’s difficult to mention just a few paintings among so much beauty, but I particularly like the Dossale di San Francesco al prato, 

the Cappella dei Priori with the fresco of Perugia skyline and its glazed terracotta tiles by Giacomo di Marino di Perugia detto Cavalla, the Polittico Guidalotti Beato Angelico. The museum makes intelligent use of multimedia technology. For example, the Pala di Girolamo by Giovan Battista Caporali shows some music written at the bottom – a folk song “A dimandar pietà” by Pietro Aretino, and that music is playing over the picture with the words to follow on a screen next to it. A gimmick? No, because there are lots of splendid pictures to admire, and one’s attention can lapse and it was nice to stand in front of the painting and look at the details and listen to the music.

After leaving the Galleria, we sit on the steps out side the cathedral and relax and admire the square and decided what to do next. Considering that breakfast was a long time ago, that turns out to be looking for lunch via a stroll among the narrow streets of Perugia. 

Many restaurants start at one o’clock, but we are already hungry and end up, unexpectedly at Sapore Greco, a clean street food cafè with a few tables where we chat to the friendly owner and eat Pita and various fried foods.

After lunch we go back up to the centre, but we are still tired from the long drive the day before so find a bench in the Rocca Paolina gardens for a rest. 

After coffee from a 24hour place we wander around some more, visit the cathedral (nicer out than in) and the fountain (again), walk along Corso Vannucci and back again where we visit the Underground area of Rocca Paolina before heading back to the car. We visited Perugia some years ago, so today we haven’t seen ‘everything’, absolutely not, but it was a great day of highlights.