Italy’s Umbria Area Is the Good Fall Vacation spot

Artù, a sublime chocolate-colored Lagotto Romagnolo — the curly-haired breed of canine recognized for its truffle-hunting capabilities — was not in in the least concerned about me. Me, buddy to all canines! Regardless of how arduous I attempted to get his consideration, making whispery noises and wiggling my fingers in his face, Artù wouldn’t a lot as solid a look in my course. Whereas his proprietor, Giovanni Calderini, lectured our small group on the sorts of truffles present in Italy’s Umbria area, Artù stared into the space, towards the brown and inexperienced of the forest, the place he knew the prized nuggets have been to be discovered.

A short time later, we have been tramping via the woods of Tenuta di Murlo, the sprawling property the place I used to be staying with the photographers (and life companions) Federico Ciamei and Martina Giammaria, who had pushed down from their residence in Milan. Truffle searching is considered one of Umbria’s marquee actions, and Tenuta di Murlo presents excursions led by Calderini over its 18,000 largely untamed acres. It was late October, black truffle season and in addition peak wet season. We have been barely on our manner when it began to drizzle — it might rain on and off for the whole thing of my week within the area — so we pulled out our umbrellas and put up our hoods. Now off-leash, Artù, nonetheless spry at 12 years outdated, bounded forward. 

After solely about 10 minutes, the canine pulled up quick in a clearing, snuffled round a spot on the bottom, after which stepped again as Calderini dug with a sort of spade on the finish of a spear, finally prying up, ever so gently, what seemed like a small blond rock. We handed it round, cupping it in our fingers like gold. I acknowledged the earthy, musky scent — not from truffles, which I had by no means eaten, however from the truffle-flavored popcorn bought at my neighborhood movie show again in Brooklyn. Calderini pocketed the mushroom whereas Artù sat patiently for pictures. I used to be lastly in a position to pat his silky coat as he seemed up at me with forbearance. Then it was time for his reward: a sport of fetch, initiated by Calderini. 

That night time, at Tenuta di Murlo’s homey Il Caldaro restaurant, Federico, Martina, and I have been served velvety eggs on toasted sourdough, topped with flecks of the identical truffle Artù had unearthed. Later, in my room, I texted a buddy again in the US: “At the moment I went truffle searching with a canine within the forests of Umbria.” It gave the impression of a line from Shakespeare.

“Isn’t it unusual that life has introduced you to a spot the place you might write that sentence?” my buddy replied. 

It’s a bit of acquired knowledge that Umbria is “the following Tuscany,” the concept being that discerning vacationers for whom Florence and the encircling countryside are a bit too common will uncover comparable sights — hill cities, rustic trattorias, creative masterworks — within the area’s much less touristy southeastern neighbor. However judging from my admittedly transient time in Umbria, the comparability doesn’t fairly maintain up. Umbria is its personal factor. Perhaps it was the cool autumn air, or the moody clouds that shadowed us all through the week. However on my first morning at Tenuta di Murlo, searching over the misty panorama simply exterior our villa, Umbria appeared somewhat wilder than Tuscany, extra lush and atmospheric. 

Over drinks and snacks within the Orangerie, which serves because the property’s check-in station and breakfast room, Carlotta Carabba Tettamanti, who owns Tenuta di Murlo together with her husband, Alessio, advised me the historical past of the property. The land has been in Alessio’s household for greater than 300 years. For many of its lifetime it was a farm that adopted the outdated mezzadria system: farmers, or mezzadri, lived on the property and cultivated it, giving a portion of the harvest to the landowner, or padrone. As modernization unfold all through Italy within the Nineteen Sixties, the system was abolished, and farmers deserted their rustic dwellings in favor of homes with electrical energy and working water in cities and cities. Finally the outdated Tenuta di Murlo farmhouses fell to wreck. Since 2006, Carlotta has been fastidiously restoring them and turning them into totally serviced luxurious villas. There are at the moment 9, with extra on the best way, in addition to a number of conventional visitor rooms in a separate constructing. 

Federico, Martina, and I stayed at Villa Penna, a pair of white stone buildings — as soon as a church and its priory — simply down the street from Carlotta and Alessio’s castle-like residence. Just a few steps from our door was our non-public infinity pool, which met the crest of a hill, and although in October it was too cool to swim, we might think about the crystalline view we might have loved from the water in summer time. Inside the previous church was a sunken lounge with comfortably oversize seating organized round a hearth, an infinite kitchen and eating space with a ceiling crossed by rough-hewn picket beams, and a grand bed room that had the presence of a theater set. 

Carlotta had included a lot of considerate particulars: once I bought up in the midst of the night time to make use of the lavatory, tiny motion-sensitive lights at ankle degree led the best way. The sense of solitude and serenity was enveloping. Stepping out within the twilight to do some laundry within the close by pool home, I scanned the dusky horizon for the wildlife I’d been advised I’d see — porcupine, wild boar, roe deer, fox. (For higher or worse, I didn’t encounter any.) 

A tour of the property gave us the possibility to go to a number of of the opposite villas — all of them white stone buildings with characteristically Umbrian terra-cotta roofs. Villa Molinella, the smallest, is a former mill that sits subsequent to a quietly burbling stream and has an underground Jacuzzi the place the mill wheel was once. Probably the most romantic of Tenuta di Murlo’s villas, it wouldn’t look misplaced in a Monet portray. Villa Torre was as soon as a protection tower from which troopers monitored the close by street, so it has wide-angle views of the countryside. 

The latest renovation was additionally essentially the most spectacular. Positioned on a hill excessive above the city of La Bruna, the 10-bedroom Villa Castiglione Ugolino is one other former church, this one constructed within the Thirteenth century. The primary chapel, which has frescoes from the college of Cimabue in Easter-egg colours, stays untouched, and capabilities as an occasion area.

Tenuta di Murlo has a working farm the place Federico, Martina, and I fed sheep and goats and nuzzled with rabbits. We suited up in yellow beekeeper outfits and toured the resident apiary, from which the property attracts its personal honey. On our final night time, a workforce of cooks turned the kitchen of our villa right into a hive of exercise, too, getting ready a non-public feast that blended the flavors of late summer time and early fall: a pecorino soufflé with pear sauce; agnolotti del plin with black truffles and burrata; scallops with tomatoes, caperberries, and olives; and contemporary berries and ice cream. 

One morning, Federico, Martina, and I met up with an American expat named Rudston Steward, who was taking us on a half-day stroll from the tiny medieval village of Giano dell’Umbria to the hill city of Montefalco, a distance of about eight miles. Steward has been giving strolling excursions round his adopted residence of Italy for nearly twenty years; in 2016, he based the Maremma Safari Membership, which is kind of a one-man operation. He as soon as guided walks in Bhutan, Nepal, and different nations, however, as he turned involved about air journey’s carbon footprint, realized that one doesn’t should fly world wide to reap the advantages of journey. Each nook of Italy presents its personal treasures. “You may have an enormous number of experiences in a single nation,” he advised me.

Every year Steward conducts a handful of four- to five-day group journeys — subsequent spring and summer time’s roster contains hikes in Calabria, Sicily, Tuscany, and the Dolomites — in addition to {custom} excursions for personal shoppers. Just a few weeks earlier than my journey, we had spoken by telephone. When he talked about that the deconsecrated Church of San Francesco in Montefalco had an early fresco cycle by the Renaissance grasp Benozzo Gozzoli, whose joyous work in Florence’s Chapel of the Magi I had seen years in the past and liked, we agreed to construction a stroll round seeing it. 

For all of the discuss within the journey trade about “genuine experiences,” moments after we pierce the membrane between ourselves and our environment will be uncommon. Steward’s stroll was the actual deal: a four-hour amble alongside secondary roads previous farmsteads and olive groves, the undulating terrain fanning out round us on all sides. Goats peered skeptically at us from behind fences; canines barked at our method. Simply exterior Giano dell’Umbria, we handed hunters darting out and in of the woods. Just a few of their gunshots sounded a bit too shut for my consolation, however Steward paid them no thoughts, unflappably stating broom, juniper, wild asparagus. 

As we handed via the quiet hamlet of Rustichino, we met an aged man strolling down the principle street. “Do you need to stroll with us?” Steward requested. The place are you going? the person queried in Italian. We advised him our vacation spot, pointing towards the hill city within the distance, nonetheless some miles away. You’d higher have some meals earlier than you get there, he replied, laughing, otherwise you’ll be hungry. (Certainly, Steward had packed us a snack of fruit and path combine.)

We lastly reached Montefalco, somewhat drained however invigorated and hungry. Steward led us to L’Alchimista, an enoteca in the principle sq., the place we have been seated subsequent to a tableful of cheerful Montefalchesi having an extended, leisurely work lunch, and the place Steward insisted we attempt the season’s newly pressed olive oil, grass-green and peppery, on bruschetta. The delicacies of landlocked Umbria is meaty, and I’m a vegetarian, which meant that I used to be compelled — compelled! — to eat a pasta dish at virtually each meal. Chef Patrizia Moretti’s strangozzi — a thick wheat noodle, which she tossed with zucchini and a creamy saffron cheese sauce — was among the many finest.

The Gozzoli frescoes, which occupy a excessive octagonal apse in San Francesco, had the identical heat and intimacy of the artist’s Magi work. The cycle tells the story of Saint Francis, who was born and died in close by Assisi, and spent a lot of his life in Umbria. (On the drive to satisfy Steward that morning, we handed via the parish of Canarra, the place Francis famously preached to the birds.) Gozzoli painted the Montefalco frescoes in 1452, greater than two centuries after Francis’s loss of life, however the fields and farms with which he crammed within the background of the saint’s life appear to exist exterior of time, and seemed lots like those we had simply hiked via. 

Assisi’s Basilica of Saint Francis additionally holds a fresco cycle that illustrates Francis’s life, this one by Giotto, Cimabue, and different medieval artists. These work are keystone works of Western artwork, and have been on the high of my record of Umbrian must-sees. On the day Federico, Martina, and I got down to go to the city, heavy rain was forecast, however we determined to take our probabilities. Midway there the sky unleashed sheets of water so thick that we might barely see the street in entrance of us; I checked my telephone and noticed that Assisi was susceptible to flash floods. It was arduous not to think about our heat and dry resort rooms, and we rotated, leaving Francis for one more journey. 

A smaller however no much less chic work awaited me within the college metropolis of Perugia, the place Tenuta di Murlo had organized for me to satisfy Elisabetta Federici, a licensed information. Federici led me into the empty Nobile Collegio del Cambio, a collection of street-level rooms in a medieval palazzo utilized by the guild of cash changers within the fifteenth century. The partitions have been painted by Perugino (with some assist from his apprentices, considered one of whom might have been Raphael) and have an meeting of Greek and Roman figures — Socrates, Pericles, Cato — in addition to non secular and mythological figures, all delicately rendered in radiant colours. It may be essentially the most lovely convention room on the earth. 

Federico, Martina, and I sensed that we have been in for one thing completely different — one thing playful — as we drove up the twisting driveway of Reschio, an property that sits on Umbria’s border with Tuscany. We parked close to the Castello, or fort, a Tenth-century construction that’s been reworked as a 36-room resort with an interesting fun-house sensibility. We wandered into the Palm Courtroom, the place a pianist was enjoying a cocktail-bar tackle the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers,” then toured the adjoining garden, with its lozenge-shaped pool surrounded by umbrella pines. My room had ocher partitions, a large cover mattress, a pumpkin-colored divan, and oddball classic work, the sort you would possibly come throughout at a flea market: a black French bulldog, a somber girl in a straw hat. (These work popped up all through the general public areas as properly; my favourite was a Victorian whitebeard with two monumental pink flowers over his ears.)

Like Tenuta di Murlo, Reschio was as soon as a farm that operated below the mezzadria system. Rely Antonio Bolza, who was born in Hungary however whose ancestral household hails from Italy, acquired the three,700-acre property in 1994 along with his Austrian spouse, Countess Angelika, and started restoring its 50 deserted farmhouses. In time, their son, Rely Benedikt, who had studied structure in London, took over the mission, elevating a household within the Castello along with his spouse, Donna Nencia, and finally turning the constructing right into a resort that additionally serves as a showcase for his furnishings designs.

We met Rely Benedikt on the Tabaccaia, an extended, two-story constructing that was as soon as a tobacco manufacturing facility and now holds his design studio. Together with his thick swoop of hair, crimson wool blazer, and striped scarf, he jogged my memory of a youthful Jeremy Irons. He has continued to revive the scattered farmhouses, which are actually owned by non-public shoppers and include the companies of cooks, gardeners, drivers, and housekeepers. A few of these shoppers are well-known, and the Castello, too, attracts well-known actors and musicians; in actual fact, Reschio requests that, when you take images throughout your keep, you make it possible for different visitors don’t seem in them.

Over the following few days, Federico, Martina, and I explored Reschio the best way children would possibly discover a brand new playground. Donna Nencia is a passionate equestrian, and the resort’s stables, populated by lovely Spanish horses, have been essentially the most luxurious (and cleanest) I had ever seen. We watched a freshly shampooed horse dry off below an infinite warmth lamp. We sat on deck chairs by the pool and ordered pressed sandwiches from the adjoining bar. We monkeyed round on the out of doors gymnasium and watched different visitors enjoying tennis on the Astroturf courts. I had a therapeutic massage within the spa, which occupies the previous wine cellar, in a room that seemed like a medieval kitchen, lit by candles and a blazing fire. And I ate further portions of pasta on the resort’s two eating places: the quietly refined Castello and the extra informal Ristorante alle Scuderie. The latter is a tall, ethereal room with floor-to-ceiling home windows that sits a brief stroll from the Castello. Strolling again to our rooms after dinner within the pitch darkish, Federico, Martina, and I heard a snuffling sound coming from the adjoining fields. Umbria’s well-known wild boars, we realized, and picked up the tempo.

I couldn’t assist evaluating Reschio and Tenuta di Murlo, and contemplating the best way the 2 properties complement one another. Reschio is fizzy and social and kooky. Tenuta di Murlo is a bit more grown-up, somewhat extra subdued. If Reschio is drinks by the pool and the shock of quirky design, Tenuta di Murlo is a peaceable night with household and an excellent e book, and the deep satisfaction of privateness and proximity to nature. Keep first at one, after which the opposite, in whichever order fits your emotional wants.

On our final night time, we drove to the city of Niccone searching for a restaurant I had examine. It was a Wednesday night time and the principle road was abandoned. It took us some time to search out Locanda di Nonna Gelsa — the doorway was in a greenhouse in the back of an unassuming constructing. The décor was easy and unfussy; the tables have been lined with checkered cloths. The jolly proprietor, Chiara de Chirico, introduced a blackboard with the night time’s menu. I ordered a hearty ribollita soup after which fagottini, star-shaped pockets of pasta, drizzled with arugula pesto. 

On that night time Nonna Gelsa appeared to be populated by close by residents and some vacationers, however de Chirico mentioned that Reschio and different new high-end accommodations had, over time, introduced an infusion of recent patrons, a few of them well-known. (My entrée, she identified, was Meryl Streep’s favourite.) Nevertheless it was clear that no quantity of movie star had modified Nonna Gelsa, and no quantity would. “In case you are posh,” mentioned de Chirico, “this isn’t the place for you.” Nonna Gelsa was the sort of genuine Italian trattoria that vacationers dream about — the sort that appears the identical within the 2020s because it did within the Nineteen Twenties. 

I considered one thing Rely Benedikt had advised me: “The world has modified, however Umbria hasn’t. And also you don’t need it to alter. It’s lovely as it’s.” 

The place to Keep

Reschio

Reschio is a beguiling, richly designed resort set on an idyllic 3,700-acre swath of northern Umbria. Benefit from the various actions available — together with horseback driving, foraging, cooking lessons, e-bike driving, and tennis — or grasp by the pool with a panini and a drink by your aspect.

Tenuta di Murlo

Lease a villa on this peaceable, secluded property and also you’ll really feel such as you’ve made your fortune and retired to the Umbrian countryside. Every home is handsomely adorned and comes with its personal non-public pool. The service is excellent.

The place to Eat

L’Alchimista

An inviting wine bar on the principle sq. in Montefalco, with a menu of hearty meat dishes and, come autumn, truffle-inflected recipes.

Locanda di Nonna Gelsa

No frills, no fuss — only a rotating menu of Umbrian classics enhanced by the great humor of proprietor Chiara de Chirico and her pleasant workers. This restaurant is situated within the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village of Niccone.

What to Do

Maremma Safari Membership

The amiable, American-born Rudston Steward, who has lived in Italy for greater than twenty years, presents multiday group and personal strolling excursions all through the nation. Whereas Umbria isn’t at the moment on his roster of deliberate itineraries, he can custom-design a non-public tour.

A model of this story first appeared within the November 2024 concern of Journey + Leisure below the headline “Earthly Delights.”