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39 Km (24 miles) NE of Perugia; 170 Km (105 miles) SE of Florence; 200 Km (124 miles) N of Rome
Gubbio looks every inch the no-nonsense town, a central Italian city of distilled medieval fundamentals. Sharp-edged fortresslike buildings of light stone line long roads that are stacked up the base of the monumental tree-covered pyramid of a mountain. Gubbio is proud of its patron saint, medieval palaces, and homespun school of painting. And its hill-town cocoon of Gothic silence occasionally bursts open with the spectacular color and noise of some of the region's most deeply ingrained traditional festivals.
With the romantic ruins of its Roman theater just below the panoramic terrace of its main piazza, Gubbio appears no more than a compact center unimposingly guarding a wide valley filled with farmland. But make your way up the slopes of its overgrown hill, past the temple of the city's patron saint, St. Ubaldo, to the scanty remains of its medieval mountaintop fortress, and you'll see what gives Gubbio its windswept border-town feeling. It's at the edge of a sea of mountains, wood-covered snow-capped Apennines that flow back for dozens of miles, a wild landscape on the cusp of nowhere that seems to have no business being associated with a quaint central Italian hill town.
To many, Gubbio looks as if it slipped off its mountain to settle at the foot, but the city has in fact slowly crept up the hillside. Prehistoric peoples may have lived on the lower slopes of Mts. Ingino and Foce next door -- in fact, traces of both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens have been found around here, proving that Gubbio has been prime hominid real estate for well over 30,000 years. But the Umbri tribes that established their city in the 3rd century B.C. probably lived on the valley floor, with their backs against the mountainside. They allied themselves with the Etruscans, then with the encroaching Romans, and, as the Roman municipium Iguvium, lived wholly on the valley floor.
It was a modestly prosperous city during Roman times, but the fact that the Roman Via Flaminia skipped it helped keep Gubbio out of the limelight and free from complete absorption into the empire. In effect, Iguvium managed to remain an autonomous city of the Umbri while many of its Etruscan neighbors were subjected and Latinized in more fundamental ways into Roman towns.
The Eugubium of the Dark Ages suffered its share of Gothic sacking, but by the 11th century it emerged as a bustling trade center. The smooth talking of its incorruptible and wise bishop Ubaldo saved the town from Barbarossa in 1155, and after dutifully sanctifying the man soon after his death, the medieval city went about building walls and attacking its neighbors in grand Umbrian style.
Though a worthy antagonist to warlike Perugia down the road, Gubbio never neglected its spiritual side. It welcomed St. Francis, and later his monastic cult, and became particularly beholden to the saintly Assisian after one visit. Francis, on hearing of the problem the Eugubians were having with a voracious wolf, went out into the woods and had a serious tête-à-tête with the offending lupine. Francis returned to town with the giant black wolf trotting at his heels and, in front of the townsfolk, made a pact with the wolf that it would no longer attack the local sheep and men if the town would feed it regularly; the deal was sealed with a paw-shake.
In the early 14th century, riding high, Gubbio built its monumental center and the best of its palaces. In 1387, however, began the long, boring, but basically benevolent reign of the Urbino counts of Monteferalto. During this time, Gubbio became widely known for the high-quality glazed ceramics and majolica that came out of its workshops, especially that of Maestro Giorgio Andreoli (ca. 1465-1552), an innovator and one of the world's greatest masters of the craft. After the Monteferalto line petered out in the early 16th century, the city found itself under the stifling rule of the Papal States. It reemerged at Italian unification in the 1860s.
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