Italy's only region without coast or foreign border once hid a microstate
Umbria touches neither sea nor another country, the only Italian region that can say so. Tucked inside it is the hamlet of Cospaia, which ran itself as a tiny republic from 1440 to 1826. The region's name comes from an ancient people who claimed, thanks to a fanciful etymology, to have survived the great flood.
Centred on its capital Perugia, Umbria holds about 850,000 people, making it Italy's fourth least populous region. The Tiber runs through it, Lake Trasimeno and the Marmore Falls lie within its borders, and hill towns such as Assisi, linked to Saint Francis, Gubbio, Spoleto and Orvieto dot its forested hills. Elevations range from 96 metres at Attigliano to 2,476 metres on Monte Vettore.
The Umbri, an Italic people speaking a language related to Latin, mostly lived in small upland settlements rather than cities. Pliny the Elder connected their name to the Greek word for a rain shower, which fed their boast of being Italy's oldest people, survivors of the mythical Deluge. Etruscan expansion between about 700 and 500 BC pushed them into the Apennines and took 300 of their towns, with the Tiber marking the frontier; the ancient name of Todi, Tular, meant border. After Rome crushed the Samnites and their Gallic allies at Sentinum in 295 BC, the area was absorbed, colonies were planted and the Via Flaminia was built in 219 BC. Perugia backed Mark Antony in 40 BC and Octavian nearly razed it.
Later centuries brought Goths, Byzantines, the Lombard duchy of Spoleto and eventually papal rule. Local families like the Baglioni of Perugia held sway until the region was folded into the Papal States in the fourteenth century, and Renaissance humanists revived the old name Umbria for an area long simply called the Duchy. Napoleon briefly made it the department of Trasimène. In 1860 it joined Victor Emmanuel II's kingdom, and Perugians tore down the Rocca Paolina fortress, a hated emblem of papal power.
Power from the Marmore waterfall drew a major steelworks to Terni late in the nineteenth century, shifting a farming economy toward industry. The landscape itself has been reworked: the Romans drained two shallow lakes from the Umbrian plain, the basin refilled after a fourth-century earthquake, and Benedictine monks began a second drainage in the thirteenth century that took until the eighteenth. Earthquakes still strike, most recently in 1997 and 2016.
Source: Umbria
