A Taste of Umbria

From my lookout amid Trevi’s medieval walls high above the Umbrian valley, the towers of the ancient city of Montefalco emerge out of the amber haze, and the town of Castel Ritaldi shimmers to the southwest. By midday, the most gentle and harmonious of landscapes emerges — a stretch of country between Spoleto and Assisi worth waiting for.

Umbria is not the most demonstrative of Italian regions. Why would it be? It is, after all, caught between Rome and Florence, essential stops on the Grand Tour for centuries now. Yet Umbria is a glorious region in its own very quiet way: rural, unspoiled, and blessed with gustatory treasures.

Its hilltop towns glitter in the sun with the same jewellike brilliance as those of Tuscany, but its countryside is wilder and greener, and dotted with churches and hermitages that speak less of noisy ambition than of quiet faith. And if its cuisine is a touch less sophisticated, any Umbrian would counter with proud insistence that ingredients of this quality can stand on their own. On this score, no one would argue.

From Trevi, a striking hilltop town, the olive groves spray out in all directions. A center of olive oil production since Etruscan times, the town has produced oil prized by emperors and popes. These days, relying primarily on the moraiolo olive, Trevi produces extra-virgin oils with a distinctively bold and fruity flavor that’s getting noticed far beyond Italy’s borders.

Francesco Gaudenzi, who presides over his family’s 61-year-old olive farm and press, is one of a new generation of olive oil producers grafting new techniques onto old traditions to produce a range of delicious and award-winning oils. “We have 25,000 plants, but the taste changes depending on the altitude, the composition of the earth, the exposure to the sun, and, of course, the climate,” Gaudenzi says. “Every day’s harvest is put in a different container, and then we subdivide again depending on how we are going to work the olives. Everything from the temperature to the way we break up the olives will have an impact on the taste.”

Gaudenzi has 12 years of data covering every inch of his olive groves, which stretch up the hillside almost from the valley floor. This history helps him figure out how his olives are developing and how they must be treated. In the end, though, he puts his faith in the tasting and blending expertise of his 22-year-old son, Stefano, and the magic of nature. “What we try to do is understand how the season is,” he says. “In the first few days, we begin to understand how it is working out, what nature is giving us. Then we work from there.”

He lifts the lid from a stainless steel vat of newly pressed olive oil to release an aroma that has the pungency of the bitten olive and the freshness of newly mown grass. The finished oil is something different altogether. Gaudenzi’s wife, Rossana, lays out a plate of pane sciapo, an Umbrian bread made without salt that’s all texture and little taste. The bread is drizzled with his Chiuse di Sant’Arcangelo, an oil recently named in the world’s top 50 that yields an aromatic, almost peppery taste.

Umbria is a land of olive groves, but its terrain is also ideal for grapes. In Montefalco, high on its own hill across the plain from Trevi, the locals have as much cause for quiet pride as any olive oil maker. This is the home of sagrantino, a grape and a wine that for many years was used only as a blending agent or for sweet wine because of its tannin overload and poor yields.

Marco Caprai changed all that. Then just in his 20s, he took over the family vineyard from his father, Arnaldo, in 1988 and began to test his conviction that the sagrantino grape contained the makings of a great wine. He scoured the local area for the best clones and experimented with the vines and the harvest by using different casks and fermentation periods.

Other local winemakers have followed, and the reputation of sagrantino reds has soared. Small wonder, for this explosively powerful wine manages to be deliciously full and rounded as well as complex.

In helping pilot sagrantino into the hearts of wine lovers, Caprai was nothing if not modern, setting aside part of his vineyard for experiments, teaming up with research institutes to analyze sagrantino, and investing in state-of-the-art technology. But looking out over the vineyards, you can still sense the importance of faith in the grape and in an ancient craft. The vines stretch away in serried rows, their russet leaves melding into the burned-yellow stubble of shorn wheat fields and the sienna-green slopes of Montefalco’s hillsides. These are the colors of Umbria, the same colors to be found in Giotto’s 13th-century frescoes that line the walls of the Basilica of San Francesco, just up the road in Assisi. As laughter drifts out during a tasting in the winery — there is a “Sagrantino Road” for wine-loving visitors just as there is an “Olive Trail” — it’s clear that in the intervening years, not so much has changed here after all.

That is certainly the feeling in Valtopina. This unassuming village in a valley north of Foligno becomes the center of the Italian culinary world during its annual truffle fair in November. The fair attracts most everyone involved in this ancient avocation, from apparel salesmen to breeders of yappy truffle hounds to backwoodsmen with their season’s haul.

Paolo and Alessandro Brama have nearly 100 acres of wooded hills behind Trevi, where they hunt for truffles in season, though they claim to venture farther afield to Orvieto for the whites. Alessandro concedes that his brother Paolo is the expert, and Paolo duly expounds on the right dog (not pedigree), the right place (under certain trees for the white, just about anywhere for the more common, less aromatic black — “I’ve even found them under rose bushes”), and the right depth (the whites are often deeper).

“I love truffles,” Paolo says. “I love everything about them. When I was eight years old, I used to go truffling on my scooter with a truffle puppy in my backpack. Once you’ve started with truffles, you can’t stop.”

Which is why Valtopina is packed with fairgoers on a golden Sunday morning. They walk almost reverentially from stall to stall. When they come to buy, they pay dearly: A blistering summer, which shrank the olive crop and had Caprai harvesting his grapes three weeks early, played havoc with the truffles and sent prices soaring. This year’s prized whites go for a princely 2,000 euros a kilo.

A couple approaches the Bramas and asks to smell the whites. Alessandro gives me a sly glance as if to say just watch this, and then slowly lifts the transparent lid to expose the truffles. For a moment, there’s no scent, and then an aroma that might have come from the center of the earth — dark, pungent, complex — engulfs not just the four of us huddled around these small fungi, but people three and four stalls down.

Alessandro replaces the lid quickly, as if too much exposure might doom us forever, and then smiles at the effect he has had. It is the proud smile of a man whose native place is still in touch with the divine.

Agriturismi
The Umbrian valley is 80 minutes by train from Rome, but its green and pleasant hills are a world away from the vibrant city of La Dolce Vita.

The pleasures here are far removed from any urban scene: awakening to birdsong, sipping a hot caffè on a cool morning while looking over the valley, sharing tagliatelle with fellow travelers at the end of a day’s exploration. And there’s no better way to have this experience than by staying at one of the converted farmhouses that dot the landscape.

Among the best is Malvarina, a 15th-century farmhouse set high on a hill just outside Assisi. It was here that I ate a hearty meal — fried zucchini blossoms, succulent roast lamb, and the local dolce, a strudel-like pastry called rocciata — before retiring to my cottage, a onetime cowshed now transformed.

Another farm worth trying is Le Due Torri near Spello. The farm includes a vineyard, feed production for its own herd of prized Chianina cattle, and the two medieval watchtowers for which the farm is named. Oh, and if you happen to go in summer, a swimming pool awaits.

Getting There: US Airways offers daily direct flights to Rome from Charlotte and Philadelphia. From Rome, you can reach Umbria by rental car, train, or bus. Travel time varies from one to two hours.

John McLaughlin is a UK-based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, Men’s Journal, and Travel & Leisure.