Via Romea Germanica Day 104: Moiano - Città della Pieve

What doth the Lord thy God require of thee... but to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve him with all thy heart and with all thy soul

- Deuteronomy 10:12, from the reading of the Poor Claires during noon prayers at the convent in Città della Pieve 

The breakfast at Hotel Ristorante il Pozzetto was substantial: fruit salad and yogurt as well as cappuccino and a giant croissant. Probably more calories than we consumed on today's short walk! It would have been 13.5 kilometres following the Via Romea Germanica route, but we cut an already short stage even shorter by walking along a minor highway, SP 309, for the first five kilometres. Then we turned off the road, passed by a livestock farm with white Chianina cattle, and followed a dirt track that became a forest path, climbing up and coming out on the top of the hill above Città della Pieve.

Who or what lives down those holes??

The monastery of Santa Lucia 

We arrived at the Monastery of Santa Lucia while the nuns were at midday prayer, behind the grate in the chapel. We sat in the chapel listening to them singing and chanting their prayers. When the service was over the nuns filed out of the chapel, and we rang the bell at the convent. The door opened and a voice instructed us to enter the parloir, where the hospitalier sister appeared and extended her hand through the grating to shake our hands in welcome. She stamped our pilgrim credentials and gave us the keys and the wifi password - even cloistered nuns have wifi these days! 😄

The convent guesthouse, or foresteria

In the basement of the convent guesthouse is a well-equipped kitchen, where we cooked a hearty soup of grains, lentils and vegetables with ingredients we had carried all the way from the supermarket in Villastrada yesterday. We then retired to our room with the intention of taking a Sunday afternoon nap, but a drum circle started up in the park next to the convent. 🙄 So we looked up what there is to see in Città della Pieve and prepared to go sightseeing instead. 

Città della Pieve: one town, many names 

Città della Pieve was an Etruscan and then a Roman town, under the name Salepio o Castrum Salepia. It became Christian in the second century after Christ, renamed Pieve di San Gervasio following the construction of its first church, located on the site where the cathedral now stands. Remains of the older church and of a complex that is thought to have housed pilgrims on the Via Romea Germanica may be seen in what is now the cathedral crypt.

After it was surrounded by defensive walls around the year 1000, the town came to be referred to as Castrum Plebis San Gervasi, which was later shortened to Castrum Plebis and then became Città di Castel della Pieve; the  word Castel was soon dropped from the name because it was too easily confused with nearby Città di Castello.

One painter, two names

Città della Pieve's best-known native citizen is Pietro Vannucci: the Renaissance painter more commonly referred to as Perugino (even though he's not from Perugia but from Città della Pieve - they do seem to have a problem with names around these parts!!) 

Born some time between 1446 and 1452, Perugino began studying painting in Perugia and then went on to Florence, where, according to biographer Vasari, he was apprenticed in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, working alongside such great painters as Leonardo da Vinci, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi. He is believed to have studied perspective with Piero della Francesca, and went on to become the teacher of Raphael, among other painters of the high  Renaissance. 

Around the year 1480, Pope Sixtus IV called Perugino to Rome to paint fresco panels for the walls of the Sistine Chapel. His works may also be found in Florence, Perugia, and of course his native town, Città della Pieve. 

In the cathedral is Perugino's famous self-portrait, next to his Baptism of Christ (1510). 

In the 13th-century church of San Pietro is his fresco of St. Anthony the Abbot, between saints Paul the Hermit and Marcel, produced in 1508. When the church was damaged in an earthquake in 1861, the fresco was detached and remounted on canvas, damaging its original colours, though it is still displayed in its original location on the wall behind the altar.

The church of San Pietro 

Perugino's fresco of St. Anthony the Abbot with saints Paul the Hermit and Marcel

But it is the tiny Oratory of the Confraternity known as "I Bianchi" for their habit of dressing in white robes that contains the most impressive of Perugino's frescoes in his home town: the Adoration of the Magi. 

After making the rounds of all but one of the churches containing Perugino frescoes,  we visited Palazzo Corgna, where we saw an exhibition of paintings by Michèle Demarque, a French artist who lives in Umbria and paints as an expression of medieval sacred music, particularly the works of composer, writer, philosopher and mystic Hildegard von Bingen (1098 - 1179). 

The painter explaining her work to a visitor

At five thirty all the visitors at the exhibition took seats in the adjacent hall to hear a performance by Shahnaz Mosam playing the Celtic harp and Etruscan lyre with singer and percussionist Alessandro Achilli, during which Michèle painted what she heard. 

An appropriate ending to a day of such natural and artistic beauty!

Moiano - Città della Pieve 10 km