This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
Before I began writing posts about the amazing trip we took to Italy, and before I had the chance to visit the little town of Spello in the Umbrian region, I wrote a blog post entitled Spello’s Infiorate about a festival they have there each year in which the townspeople get competitive and line the streets with carpets of flowers arranged in intricate, yet temporary designs. I would have loved to have seen this year’s festival, but our timing was off.
I would have never heard of this delightful town at all were it not for the fact that I decided to listen to audiobooks about Italy for months prior to our visit, and one of those was Il Bel Centro by Michelle Damiani. It’s about the year the author and her American family uprooted themselves and moved to Spello, which happens to be in the heart of Umbria, and also smack dab in the middle of Italy itself. It’s a love letter to the town and its people and it describes the way the experience transformed her family. It caused me to alter part of my itinerary so that I could at least spend a few hours in this place, just to see what it was like. It definitely does not disappoint.
People have lived in this very spot since the iron age (the 7th century BC), based on archeological evidence. Its founders were most likely the Umbri, for whom the Umbrian region was named. They are the most ancient group of people to occupy the Italian peninsula, so Spello’s roots run deep.
The ancient Romans conquered the area in 260 BC, and named the town Hispellum. When they built the 204-mile-long Via Flaminia in 220 BC, from Ariminum (Rimini) to Roma, it ran right past Hispellum. Many of the buildings, especially in the upper portion of the town, are still built on ancient Roman foundations.
Hispellum resisted Hannibal, and may have sent aid to Rome during the Second Punic War. It even remained loyal to Rome when some of the land in the valley below was confiscated by Augustus to reward his soldiers, which led to an Umbrian revolt that escalated into the Perusine War from 41-40 BC.
As a reward for their support, Augustus named them the Colonia Julia Hispellum at that time. Giving them his Julian family cognomen was a great honor. Augustus also expanded Hispellum’s territory by 20 kilometers, and invested heavily in its urban renewal by adding such things as a theatre, an aqueduct, public and private buildings, and a public bath. It also received an influx of urban colonists. Centuries later, under the reign of Constantine the Great, it was called Flavia Constans because the people built a great temple to worship him (this was before he jumped on the Christianity bandwagon) so he wanted to honor them as much as they had honored him.
It was a walled city in Roman times, and 1.8 kilometers of the walls still stand, as well as the gates required to pass through those walls. That, and the cozy little side alleys branching off from the main street are what give Spello its charm. If you look at the original drawing of Hispellum, you can see its shadow when you look at an aerial view of Spello.
I wish we had more than a few hours to dedicate to Spello, but we had driven from Florence that morning, as I mention in My Not-So-Sociological Study of Italy. Then we spent a few hours at the hermitage outside of Assisi (which I blogged about here), and after Spello, we were headed to Preci in order to visit Italy’s gorgeous Piano Grande the next day, (both of which I blogged about here). So this visit, of necessity, was short and sweet.
After having read about Spello in the above-mentioned book, I felt like I was coming back to a place that I’d never been before. As we walked up the main street and peeked down the flower-festooned alleys, I could totally see myself living there. I kept looking at people and wondering how many of them were the wonderful friends that the author talked about in the book. I’m pretty sure I encountered her friend Letitcia because we stopped at her place, the Bar Giardino Bonci, for Gelato and snacks and to take in the gorgeous views of the Umbrian Valley from its patio. I almost said something to her, but I lost my nerve. She seemed busy, and I didn’t want to come off as a creepy stalker. Plus, what was I expecting? That we’d be instant friends?
When we first arrived in Spello, we went to the Villa of Mosaics. This place has an amazing history. It’s the most significant archeological find in all of Umbria, and it was stumbled upon by accident. In 2005, the city was building a parking lot outside its Roman walls, as parking is at a premium in Spello. (You can’t even drive down most of the alleys where the majority of the homes are located.) And while leveling the ground, they unearthed 20 rooms of a Roman Villa that dated back to around 333 AD.
It had been sitting there, replete with elaborate mosaics and fragments of vibrant frescoes, just waiting to be rediscovered. Stuff like that never happens in America. It happens all the time in Italy, though. That’s why the country fascinates me so much.
The villa was a farming estate, nestled between the Via Flaminia and the city’s walls. Between that prime location, its opulence, and the theme in many of the mosaics, it is believed that the owner of this villa may have been a wine producer and a prominent member of the community. We just don’t make homes like these anymore, and that’s a pity.
As we wandered through the ruins, looking at the raised, heated floor in one room and the intricate mosaics and frescoes in the others, I wondered, as I often do in cases like these, about that moment when people gave up on this gorgeous place. Was it abrupt, due to a catastrophe like an epidemic, or did its owners simply leave one day, and if so, why? Was it then occupied by squatters as it declined? At what point did it become forgotten about entirely? How do you go from such opulence to complete obscurity? It just seems like such an odd fate for something that was once so beautiful.
It’s funny, the things we decide are worth holding on to, and the things we allow to crumble into dust. It’s just more evidence that the only thing that can be counted upon is the passage of time. It makes me think of that quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
But, dear, bitter, mourning Macbeth, all that we do may not seem to mean a thing in the face of our inevitable mortality, but I would argue that we do leave things behind. It’s up to future generations to take up the torch before it sputters out. Sometimes, things are allowed crumble into obscurity. If fortune allows, they might later be rediscovered and partially renewed. But as long as places like Spello not only survive, but thrive, our tales do, after all, signify something.
It was an honor to bear witness to that, in a small town smack dab in the center of Italy, if only for a few hours.
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