Italy’s Umbria Region Is the Perfect Fall Destination

Artù, an elegant chocolate-colored Lagotto Romagnolo — the curly-haired breed of canine known for its truffle-hunting capabilities — was not in the least bit interested in me. Me, friend to all dogs! No matter how hard I tried to get his attention, making whispery noises and wiggling my fingers in his face, Artù wouldn’t so much as cast a glance in my direction. While his owner, Giovanni Calderini, lectured our small group on the kinds of truffles found in Italy’s Umbria region, Artù stared into the distance, toward the brown and green of the forest, where he knew the prized nuggets were to be found.

A short while later, we were tramping through the woods of Tenuta di Murlo, the sprawling estate where I was staying with the photographers (and life partners) Federico Ciamei and Martina Giammaria, who had driven down from their home in Milan. Truffle hunting is one of Umbria’s marquee activities, and Tenuta di Murlo offers excursions led by Calderini over its 18,000 largely untamed acres. It was late October, black truffle season and also peak rainy season. We were barely on our way when it started to drizzle — it would rain off and on for the entirety of my week in the region — so we pulled out our umbrellas and put up our hoods. Now off-leash, Artù, still spry at 12 years old, bounded ahead. 

After only about 10 minutes, the dog pulled up short in a clearing, snuffled around a spot on the ground, and then stepped back as Calderini dug with a kind of spade at the end of a spear, eventually prying up, ever so gently, what looked like a small blond rock. We passed it around, cupping it in our hands like gold. I recognized the earthy, musky scent — not from truffles, which I had never eaten, but from the truffle-flavored popcorn sold at my neighborhood movie theater back in Brooklyn. Calderini pocketed the mushroom while Artù sat patiently for photos. I was finally able to pat his silky coat as he looked up at me with forbearance. Then it was time for his reward: a game of fetch, initiated by Calderini. 

That night, at Tenuta di Murlo’s homey Il Caldaro restaurant, Federico, Martina, and I were served velvety eggs on toasted sourdough, topped with flecks of the same truffle Artù had unearthed. Later, in my room, I texted a friend back in the United States: “Today I went truffle hunting with a dog in the forests of Umbria.” It sounded like a line from Shakespeare.

“Isn’t it strange that life has brought you to a place where you could write that sentence?” my friend replied. 

It’s a piece of received wisdom that Umbria is “the next Tuscany,” the idea being that discerning travelers for whom Florence and the surrounding countryside are a bit too popular will uncover similar attractions — hill towns, rustic trattorias, artistic masterworks — in the region’s less touristy southeastern neighbor. But judging from my admittedly brief time in Umbria, the comparison doesn’t quite hold up. Umbria is its own thing. Maybe it was the cool autumn air, or the moody clouds that shadowed us throughout the week. But on my first morning at Tenuta di Murlo, looking out over the misty landscape just outside our villa, Umbria seemed a little wilder than Tuscany, more lush and atmospheric. 

Over drinks and snacks in the Orangerie, which serves as the estate’s check-in station and breakfast room, Carlotta Carabba Tettamanti, who owns Tenuta di Murlo with her husband, Alessio, told me the history of the property. The land has been in Alessio’s family for more than 300 years. For most of its lifetime it was a farm that followed the old mezzadria system: farmers, or mezzadri, lived on the estate and cultivated it, giving a portion of the harvest to the landowner, or padrone. As modernization spread throughout Italy in the 1960s, the system was abolished, and farmers abandoned their rustic dwellings in favor of houses with electricity and running water in towns and cities. Eventually the old Tenuta di Murlo farmhouses fell to ruin. Since 2006, Carlotta has been carefully restoring them and turning them into fully serviced luxury villas. There are currently nine, with more on the way, as well as a few traditional guest rooms in a separate building. 

Federico, Martina, and I stayed at Villa Penna, a pair of white stone buildings — once a church and its priory — just down the road from Carlotta and Alessio’s castle-like home. A few steps from our door was our private infinity pool, which met the crest of a hill, and though in October it was too cool to swim, we could imagine the crystalline view we would have enjoyed from the water in summer. Inside the former church was a sunken living room with comfortably oversize seating arranged around a fireplace, an enormous kitchen and dining area with a ceiling crossed by rough-hewn wooden beams, and a grand bedroom that had the presence of a theater set. 

Carlotta had included a number of thoughtful details: when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, tiny motion-sensitive lights at ankle level led the way. The sense of solitude and serenity was enveloping. Stepping out in the twilight to do some laundry in the nearby pool house, I scanned the dusky horizon for the wildlife I’d been told I might see — porcupine, wild boar, roe deer, fox. (For better or worse, I didn’t encounter any.) 

A tour of the estate gave us the chance to visit a few of the other villas — all of them white stone buildings with characteristically Umbrian terra-cotta roofs. Villa Molinella, the smallest, is a former mill that sits next to a quietly burbling stream and has an underground Jacuzzi where the mill wheel used to be. The most romantic of Tenuta di Murlo’s villas, it wouldn’t look out of place in a Monet painting. Villa Torre was once a defense tower from which soldiers monitored the nearby road, so it has wide-angle views of the countryside. 

The most recent renovation was also the most spectacular. Located on a hill high above the town of La Bruna, the 10-bedroom Villa Castiglione Ugolino is another former church, this one built in the 13th century. The main chapel, which has frescoes from the school of Cimabue in Easter-egg colors, remains untouched, and functions as an event space.

Tenuta di Murlo has a working farm where Federico, Martina, and I fed sheep and goats and nuzzled with rabbits. We suited up in yellow beekeeper outfits and toured the resident apiary, from which the property draws its own honey. On our last night, a team of chefs turned the kitchen of our villa into a hive of activity, too, preparing a private feast that blended the flavors of late summer and early fall: a pecorino soufflé with pear sauce; agnolotti del plin with black truffles and burrata; scallops with tomatoes, caperberries, and olives; and fresh berries and ice cream. 

One morning, Federico, Martina, and I met up with an American expat named Rudston Steward, who was taking us on a half-day walk from the tiny medieval village of Giano dell’Umbria to the hill town of Montefalco, a distance of about eight miles. Steward has been giving walking tours around his adopted home of Italy for almost two decades; in 2016, he founded the Maremma Safari Club, which is more or less a one-man operation. He once guided walks in Bhutan, Nepal, and other countries, but, as he became concerned about air travel’s carbon footprint, realized that one doesn’t have to fly around the world to reap the benefits of travel. Every corner of Italy offers its own treasures. “You can have a huge variety of experiences in one country,” he told me.

Each year Steward conducts a handful of four- to five-day group trips — next spring and summer’s roster includes hikes in Calabria, Sicily, Tuscany, and the Dolomites — as well as custom tours for private clients. A few weeks before my trip, we had spoken by phone. When he mentioned that the deconsecrated Church of San Francesco in Montefalco had an early fresco cycle by the Renaissance master Benozzo Gozzoli, whose joyous paintings in Florence’s Chapel of the Magi I had seen years ago and loved, we agreed to structure a walk around seeing it. 

For all the talk in the travel industry about “authentic experiences,” moments when we pierce the membrane between ourselves and our surroundings can be rare. Steward’s walk was the real deal: a four-hour amble along secondary roads past farmsteads and olive groves, the undulating terrain fanning out around us on all sides. Goats peered skeptically at us from behind fences; dogs barked at our approach. Just outside Giano dell’Umbria, we passed hunters darting in and out of the woods. A few of their gunshots sounded a bit too close for my comfort, but Steward paid them no mind, unflappably pointing out broom, juniper, wild asparagus. 

As we passed through the quiet hamlet of Rustichino, we met an elderly man walking down the main road. “Do you want to walk with us?” Steward asked. Where are you going? the man queried in Italian. We told him our destination, pointing toward the hill town in the distance, still some miles away. You’d better have some food before you get there, he replied, laughing, or you’ll be hungry. (Indeed, Steward had packed us a snack of fruit and trail mix.)

We finally reached Montefalco, a little tired but invigorated and hungry. Steward led us to L’Alchimista, an enoteca in the main square, where we were seated next to a tableful of cheerful Montefalchesi having a long, leisurely work lunch, and where Steward insisted we try the season’s newly pressed olive oil, grass-green and peppery, on bruschetta. The cuisine of landlocked Umbria is meaty, and I’m a vegetarian, which meant that I was forced — forced! — to eat a pasta dish at almost every meal. Chef Patrizia Moretti’s strangozzi — a thick wheat noodle, which she tossed with zucchini and a creamy saffron cheese sauce — was among the best.

The Gozzoli frescoes, which occupy a high octagonal apse in San Francesco, had the same warmth and intimacy of the artist’s Magi paintings. The cycle tells the story of Saint Francis, who was born and died in nearby Assisi, and spent much of his life in Umbria. (On the drive to meet Steward that morning, we passed through the parish of Canarra, where Francis famously preached to the birds.) Gozzoli painted the Montefalco frescoes in 1452, more than two centuries after Francis’s death, but the fields and farms with which he filled in the background of the saint’s life seem to exist outside of time, and looked a lot like the ones we had just hiked through. 

Assisi’s Basilica of Saint Francis also holds a fresco cycle that illustrates Francis’s life, this one by Giotto, Cimabue, and other medieval artists. These paintings are keystone works of Western art, and were at the top of my list of Umbrian must-sees. On the day Federico, Martina, and I set out to visit the town, heavy rain was forecast, but we decided to take our chances. Halfway there the sky unleashed sheets of water so thick that we could barely see the road in front of us; I checked my phone and saw that Assisi was at risk of flash floods. It was hard not to think of our warm and dry hotel rooms, and we turned around, leaving Francis for another trip. 

A smaller but no less sublime work awaited me in the university city of Perugia, where Tenuta di Murlo had arranged for me to meet Elisabetta Federici, a licensed guide. Federici led me into the empty Nobile Collegio del Cambio, a suite of street-level rooms in a medieval palazzo used by the guild of money changers in the 15th century. The walls were painted by Perugino (with some help from his apprentices, one of whom may have been Raphael) and feature an assembly of Greek and Roman figures — Socrates, Pericles, Cato — as well as religious and mythological figures, all delicately rendered in radiant colors. It might be the most beautiful conference room in the world. 

Federico, Martina, and I sensed that we were in for something different — something playful — as we drove up the twisting driveway of Reschio, an estate that sits on Umbria’s border with Tuscany. We parked near the Castello, or castle, a 10th-century structure that’s been remodeled as a 36-room hotel with an appealing fun-house sensibility. We wandered into the Palm Court, where a pianist was playing a cocktail-bar take on the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers,” then toured the adjacent lawn, with its lozenge-shaped pool surrounded by umbrella pines. My room had ocher walls, a wide canopy bed, a pumpkin-colored divan, and oddball vintage paintings, the kind you might come across at a flea market: a black French bulldog, a somber woman in a straw hat. (These paintings popped up throughout the public spaces as well; my favorite was a Victorian whitebeard with two enormous pink flowers over his ears.)

Like Tenuta di Murlo, Reschio was once a farm that operated under the mezzadria system. Count Antonio Bolza, who was born in Hungary but whose ancestral family hails from Italy, acquired the 3,700-acre property in 1994 with his Austrian wife, Countess Angelika, and began restoring its 50 abandoned farmhouses. In time, their son, Count Benedikt, who had studied architecture in London, took over the project, raising a family in the Castello with his wife, Donna Nencia, and eventually turning the building into a hotel that also serves as a showcase for his furniture designs.

We met Count Benedikt at the Tabaccaia, a long, two-story building that was once a tobacco factory and now holds his design studio. With his thick swoop of hair, crimson wool blazer, and striped scarf, he reminded me of a younger Jeremy Irons. He has continued to restore the scattered farmhouses, which are now owned by private clients and come with the services of cooks, gardeners, drivers, and housekeepers. Some of those clients are famous, and the Castello, too, draws well-known actors and musicians; in fact, Reschio requests that, if you take photographs during your stay, you make sure that other guests don’t appear in them.

Over the next few days, Federico, Martina, and I explored Reschio the way kids might explore a new playground. Donna Nencia is a passionate equestrian, and the hotel’s stables, populated by beautiful Spanish horses, were the most luxurious (and cleanest) I had ever seen. We watched a freshly shampooed horse dry off under an enormous heat lamp. We sat on deck chairs by the pool and ordered pressed sandwiches from the adjacent bar. We monkeyed around at the outdoor gym and watched other guests playing tennis on the Astroturf courts. I had a massage in the spa, which occupies the former wine cellar, in a room that looked like a medieval kitchen, lit by candles and a blazing fireplace. And I ate additional quantities of pasta at the hotel’s two restaurants: the quietly refined Castello and the more casual Ristorante alle Scuderie. The latter is a tall, airy room with floor-to-ceiling windows that sits a short walk from the Castello. Strolling back to our rooms after dinner in the pitch dark, Federico, Martina, and I heard a snuffling sound coming from the adjacent fields. Umbria’s famous wild boars, we realized, and picked up the pace.

I couldn’t help comparing Reschio and Tenuta di Murlo, and considering the way the two properties complement each other. Reschio is fizzy and social and whimsical. Tenuta di Murlo is a little more grown-up, a little more subdued. If Reschio is drinks by the pool and the surprise of quirky design, Tenuta di Murlo is a peaceful evening with family and a good book, and the deep satisfaction of privacy and proximity to nature. Stay first at one, and then the other, in whichever order suits your emotional needs.

On our last night, we drove to the town of Niccone in search of a restaurant I had read about. It was a Wednesday night and the main street was deserted. It took us a while to find Locanda di Nonna Gelsa — the entrance was in a greenhouse at the back of an unassuming building. The décor was simple and unfussy; the tables were covered with checkered cloths. The jolly owner, Chiara de Chirico, brought a blackboard with the night’s menu. I ordered a hearty ribollita soup and then fagottini, star-shaped pockets of pasta, drizzled with arugula pesto. 

On that night Nonna Gelsa seemed to be populated by nearby residents and a few tourists, but de Chirico said that Reschio and other new high-end hotels had, over time, brought an infusion of new patrons, some of them well-known. (My entrée, she pointed out, was Meryl Streep’s favorite.) But it was clear that no amount of celebrity had changed Nonna Gelsa, and no amount would. “If you are posh,” said de Chirico, “this is not the place for you.” Nonna Gelsa was the kind of authentic Italian trattoria that travelers dream about — the kind that looks the same in the 2020s as it did in the 1920s. 

I thought of something Count Benedikt had told me: “The world has changed, but Umbria hasn’t. And you don’t want it to change. It’s beautiful as it is.” 

Where to Stay

Reschio

Reschio is a beguiling, richly designed resort set on an idyllic 3,700-acre swath of northern Umbria. Take advantage of the many activities on hand — including horseback riding, foraging, cooking classes, e-bike riding, and tennis — or hang by the pool with a panini and a drink by your side.

Tenuta di Murlo

Rent a villa on this peaceful, secluded estate and you’ll feel like you’ve made your fortune and retired to the Umbrian countryside. Each house is handsomely decorated and comes with its own private pool. The service is outstanding.

Where to Eat

L’Alchimista

An inviting wine bar on the main square in Montefalco, with a menu of hearty meat dishes and, come autumn, truffle-inflected recipes.

Locanda di Nonna Gelsa

No frills, no fuss — just a rotating menu of Umbrian classics enhanced by the good humor of owner Chiara de Chirico and her friendly staff. This restaurant is located in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village of Niccone.

What to Do

Maremma Safari Club

The amiable, American-born Rudston Steward, who has lived in Italy for more than two decades, offers multiday group and private walking tours throughout the country. While Umbria isn’t currently on his roster of planned itineraries, he can custom-design a private tour.

A version of this story first appeared in the November 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Earthly Delights.”