We walked Perugia’s underground city.

Pope Paul III, who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment, in the mid 1500s had a beef with the ruling family of Perugia, the Baglionis. To make a long story short, he got into what gets called the Guerra del sale, salt war, when he imposed a tax on salt. This started a war which Perugia lost. Pope Paul III knocked down many of the towers where the Baglioni families lived and built a fortress using the destroyed towers as foundations but in areas under the fortress the streets and tower bases remain.

Parts of the massive fortress still stand

We looked at the church of San Domenico. It was the original home of the Fra Angelico altarpiece we looked at the previous day.

It has two works which relate to women in Renaissance Italian art. One is a painting by Plautilla Nelli, a Dominican nun, one of the few women artists mentioned in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists.

It is interesting that it includes a number of women occupying the central space of the painting. Another painting in the same church was commissioned by a woman, Beata Colomba, also a Dominican nun.

Also in Perugia is the Holy Trinity a fresco in San Severo chapel in San Severo church, executed by Raphael and Perugino. Chapel of San Severo is located in the vicinity of the church dedicated to St. Severus, which stands in the highest part of the city, not far from Porta Sole. The chapel was formerly part of the 15th-century church of San Severo, but when the church was rebuilt in the eighteenth century, the chapel was isolated but preserved because of the Raphael fresco (which is in poor condition).

Raphael completed the upper portion then went off to Florence and Rome and never returned before he died. The lower half was painted by Perugino, one of his last works.

Some views of the hills around Perugia:

Some views of the city:

More gelato:

We left the beautiful views and sunshine

to drive about 2 hours to Urbino, where it was raining, hard.

Urbino (population about 15,000) is a walled city in the Marche region, a UNESCO World Heritage Site notable for a historical legacy of independent Renaissance culture, especially under the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino from 1444 to 1482. He restructured the city along modern concepts of efficiency and beauty. It is in the foothills of the Apennines. In the early 16th century, it became part of the Papal States.

I was here in 2023 when the area was suffering from floods.

Tomorrow will be for exploring Urbino and more Piero. We all are hoping it is not raining.