Book Assisi attraction tickets

Few Italian towns carry their history as visibly as Assisi. Perched on the western slope of Monte Subasio in Umbria, the town looks much as it did in the medieval centuries that shaped it, its rose-coloured stone buildings stepping down the hillside above the broad plain of the Tiber valley. The name alone conjures Saint Francis, born here in 1181 or 1182, and the extraordinary religious and artistic legacy that followed his life and death. Yet Assisi is not a place that exists solely for pilgrimage. It rewards anyone who arrives with curiosity about Italian medieval culture, Umbrian landscape, and the particular atmosphere of a town that has been continuously inhabited and carefully preserved for nearly a thousand years.

The Basilica di San Francesco, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, anchors the western end of the old town and remains the gravitational centre of any visit. Its two superimposed churches contain some of the most significant fresco cycles in Western art, including works attributed to Cimabue and Giotto that effectively mark the beginning of the Italian pictorial tradition. The piazzas and lanes radiating outward from the basilica lead through a compact medieval fabric of churches, convents, and civic buildings that together tell the story of a prosperous commune at the height of the Middle Ages.