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THE FOODS
Umbria is a compact region at the core of the peninsula, and it is known as the green heart of Italy. Its attractions include the art and architecture of its hill towns, Perugia, Assisi, Orvieto, Spoleto and Todi, among them, and the legends of its many saints, led by Francis of Assisi. But connoisseurs also know that nowhere in Italy are the pleasures of country cooking and local wines offered more graciously than in Umbria.
Since the region has no access to the sea, its peoples, beginning with the ancient Umbri and Etruscans who inhabited territories on opposite sides of the Tiber River, have always relied on the generosity of the land. There are few secrets to Umbrian cooking, other than the native's insistence or obsession, really, on home-grown produce: fresh vegetables and fruit, dense green olive oil, roast meats, poultry and game, pecorino cheese and the herbs, greens and mushrooms that grow spontaneously on wooded hillsides.
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THE WINES
Umbria has long been renowned for white wine, thanks mainly to the historical prominence of Orvieto. But evidence is now irrefutable that the scenic hills of the "green heart of Italy" have an aptitude for a multitude of varieties, white and red, native and foreign. The region's two DOCG wines, Montefalco Sagrantino and Torgiano Rosso Riserva, are red.
Orvieto was once the most celebrated of Italian whites as a semisweet or abboccato wine, praised by the popes, princes and painters who sojourned in the hill town north of Rome with its splendid Cathedral and sweeping views over the Umbrian landscape. But as tastes changed Orvieto was modified from a soft, golden wine into a pale, pure, crisp creature of modern enology.
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