A Must Read in One Breath!

Right in the heart of the Italian peninsula lies an interregional and intercultural territory, made up of 15 municipalities, where Etruscan, Umbrian, Gallic, Picene, and Roman chromosomes blended to give birth to men like Michelangelo Buonarroti, Piero della Francesca, and Alberto Burri. Raphael, Luca Signorelli, and Leonardo da Vinci lived and left their masterpieces here, and these are the very places where Saint Francis of Assisi meditated for long periods.

The Altotevere Umbro Toscano stretches from the sources of the Tiber, in the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennines, to the borders of Perugia. It is a high valley region of hills and mountains, dotted with some of the most beautiful villages in Italy, where, following the Battle of Anghiari, four regions came to share a common border.

The people of AUT belong to a unique and exclusive linguistic crossroads, where Tuscan and Umbrian are spoken with Romagnolo and Marche inflections, with dialectal variations that sharply contrast with the hypothetical political borders of the municipalities, yet with no real geographic or natural divisions like rivers or mountains.

From childhood, the people of the Upper Tiber Valley attend the same schools, share the same sports centers and places of leisure, drive the same roads, work in the same places, and get married in the same churches, just like any truly complete and cohesive community.

Apart from sea fish and ibexes, this land is home to the entire flora and fauna of the Mediterranean scrub and forest. The young, crystal-clear Tiber still harbors chubs, graylings, and trout. Goshawks soar in the sky above beech and oak forests, where fawns and roe deer trot, watched by wolves.

Here, people gather firewood and tend to their vegetable gardens. They make pasta by hand, everything by hand, as it has always been. They bake bread and ciaccia, cure pork, cook hare, collect chestnuts, and hunt for mushrooms and truffles in competition with wild boars. They prepare capon broth for cappelletti, drink fresh spring water, and shell beans to cook with pork rind.

They make honey and cheese, cure prosciutto, and smoke Vinosanto. Walnuts and pine nuts are gathered for torcolo, blackberries and cherries for tarts, juniper and wild fennel to season preserved pork loin and game meat.

There are hundreds of country farmhouses surrounded by edible hedges of rosemary, sage, marjoram, and bay laurel. Everywhere you turn, you see the green of olive trees, the colors of orchards, a tower or a bell tower, the crow of a rooster, the murmur of a stream, and the scent of the forest floor.

This is a place where you come to fine tune your senses a deeply personal, ancestral pleasure, suspended from the sterile, deafening roar of the modern age. Here, time is marked by the seasons.

Nothing is staged here except the gentle symbiosis between humans and nature. It is a place that speaks in a whisper to the man and woman you once were.

    Gregorio Boriosi