Umbria

After six years as a correspondent for The Guardian, Michael Adams spent a year exploring Umbria, which he describes as 'the and-locked heart of Italy', the only Italian region which has neither a coast-line nor a frontier with the non-Italian world. For the Romans it was a staging post on the way to their northern frontier, and the twentieth century tourist treats it often enough in the same way, hurrying across it on his way from Florence to Rome, pausing perhaps to admire Giotto's frescoes at Assisi or the Gothic exuberance of the cathedral at Orvieto, but otherwise oblivious of the fact that among these quiet hills originated some of the influences most potent in the formation of the European spirit. Here were born the founders of the Benedictine and Franciscan orders; here flourished the school of painting which produced Perugino and Raphael; and behind the walls of these Umbrian hill-cities, which have changed so little in four of five hundred years, the science of civic organization was developed in the middle ages to a pitch undreamed of north of the Alps.

With the background of a historian and the eye of a foreign correspondent, Michael Adams has shaped these aspects into a book which has a historical framework but which is also an account of Umbria as it is today; a book for the traveller who wants to be more than a tourist, who would like to know, for instance, how it is that the homeland of Saint Francis has become one of the strongholds of Italian communism -- in short, a book for anyone who, like the author, recognizes himself in the description which Browning applied to one of his characters, calling him 'the picker-up of learning's crumbs, the not-incurious in God's handiwork'.