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CITTA DELLA PIEVE |
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Città della Pieve is most famous as the birthplace of Perugino
(1445-1523), but it has a modicum of charm that merits a short visit in
its own right. Again, you're better off in a car, for the station is a
long haul from the town and it's the sort of place that can easily be
seen in an hour. From below, in the Tiber Valley, the town straggles
along a distant ridge to the east, vaguely and mysteriously enticing,
but once up in the streets it lacks the impact of other Umbrian towns,
the chief appeal being the tiny red-bricked houses (there was no local
building stone), old women knitting, and geraniums in profusion at every
window. One of the streets, Via della Baciadonna, claims to be the
narrowest in Italy, the width of a "woman's kiss", the translation
suggests. If you prefer your poetry liquid, the town's fountains run
with wine during its April festa .
Otherwise its only real interest lies in the handful of Perugino's
paintings , which lie scattered around the town's fairly dismal
churches, palaces and oratories, some of which - the Palazzo della
Corgna , the church of Sant'Agostino and the Oratorio di Santa Maria dei
Bianchi - have been united in a self-contained "circuit" known as the
Museo Aperto with a single-ticket admission, available from any of the
relevant attractions (summer, Easter & Christmas daily 10.30am-12.30pm &
4-7pm; Oct-April Fri-Sun 10.30am-12.30pm & 3.30-6.30pm; L3000/¬1.55). If
the small tourist office at Piazza Matteotti 4 (tel 0578.299.375) is
shut, there's a map of the town's few highlights outside the
unremarkable duomo in Piazza Gramsci (or Piazza Plebiscito, depending on
your politics).
The cathedral itself has a couple of late works that show Perugino in
his worst light. The painter's reputation today, though still very high,
is lower than it was in his own time, when contemporaries spoke of him
in the same breath as Leonardo and Michelangelo. He trained with
Leonardo da Vinci in Florence but largely remained faithful to the
tenets of the Umbrian School - sublime misty landscapes behind ethereal
religious subjects. His great facility enabled him to produce vast
numbers of dewy-eyed saints and Madonnas, whose occasional absence of
genuine religious sentiment horrified those who demanded sincerity above
all else in devotional art. What in his youth had been profound and
innovative gradually came to seem stilted and repetitive. Accused of
merely replicating a successful formula, he also did nothing to
discourage pupils finishing his works, adding his signature to some real
shockers - especially in old age. He remains, however, one of the
leading and most influential of the Renaissance painters. The painting
not to miss is The Adoration of the Magi in Santa Maria dei Bianchi,
considered his greatest work still resident in Italy (Napoleon removed
many to the Louvre in Paris), with lesser paintings in nearby San
Antonio Abate , San Pietro and Santa Maria dei Servi .
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