Umbria
Umbria is a region of central Italy. It includes Lake Trasimeno and Marmore Falls, and is crossed by the Tiber. It is the only landlocked region on the Apennine Peninsula. The capital is Perugia. The region has 851,954 inhabitants as of 2025.
The region is characterized by hills, mountains, thick forests, valleys and historical towns such as the university centre of Perugia, Assisi, Terni, Norcia, Città di Castello, Gubbio, Spoleto, Orvieto, Todi, Castiglione del Lago, Narni, Amelia, Spello and other small cities.
History
Antiquity
The region is named for the Umbri people, an Italic people which was absorbed by the expansion of the Romans. The Umbri, unlike the Etruscans, with few exceptions did not live in an urban society, but occupied small dwellings located in the Apennines. Pliny the Elder recounted a fanciful derivation for the tribal name from the Greek ὄμβρος, which led to the idea that they had survived the Deluge familiar from Greek mythology, allowing them to claim to be the most ancient race in Italy. In fact, they belonged to a broader family of neighbouring peoples with similar roots. Their language was Umbrian, one of the Italic languages, related to Latin and Oscan. The town of Gubbio houses today the longest and most important document of any of the Osco-Umbrian group of languages, the Iguvine Tablets, written in Umbrian at the turn of the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. The northern part of the region was occupied by Gallic tribes.The Umbri probably sprang, like neighbouring peoples, from the creators of the Terramara, and Proto-Villanovan culture in northern and central Italy, who entered north-eastern Italy at the beginning of the Bronze Age.
The Etruscans were the chief enemies of the Umbri. The Etruscan invasion extended from the western seaboard towards the north and east from about 700 to 500 BC. They eventually drove the Umbrians towards the Apennine uplands and captured 300 Umbrian towns. Nevertheless, the Umbrian population does not seem to have been eradicated in the conquered districts. The border between Etruria and Umbria was the Tiber river, as testified by the ancient name of Todi, Tular.
After the downfall of the Etruscans, Umbrians aided the Samnites in their struggle against Rome. Later communications with Samnium were impeded by the Roman fortress of Narnia. Romans defeated the Samnites and their Gallic allies in the battle of Sentinum. Allied Umbrians and Etruscans had to return home and defend each of their territories against simultaneous Roman attacks, leaving the Samnites without their help at Sentinum.
The Roman victory at Sentinum initiated a period of integration under the Roman rulers, who established some colonies, such as Spoletium, and built the via Flaminia. The via Flaminia became a principal vector for Roman development in Umbria. During Hannibal's invasion during the Second Punic War, the battle of Lake Trasimene was fought inside the borders of today's Umbria, but the local people did not aid the invader.
During the Roman Civil War between Mark Antony and Octavian, the city of Perugia supported Antony and was almost completely destroyed by Octavian. In Pliny the Elder's time, 49 independent communities still existed in Umbria, and the abundance of inscriptions and the high proportion of recruits in the imperial army attest to its population. Under Augustus, Umbria became the Regio VI of Roman Italy.
Modern Umbria is different from Roman Umbria. Roman Umbria extended through most of what is now the northern Marche to Ravenna, but excluded the west bank of the Tiber, which belonged to Etruria. Thus Perugia was an Etruscan city and the area around Norcia was in the Sabine territory.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Ostrogoths and Byzantines struggled for supremacy in the region, and the decisive battle of the war between these two peoples took place near modern Gualdo Tadino.
Middle Ages
Soon after the end of the Gothic war, the Lombards invaded Italy and founded the duchy of Spoleto, covering much of today's southern Umbria, but the Byzantine were able to keep in the region a corridor along the Via Flaminia linking Rome with the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis. The Lombard king controlled also the northern part of the region ruled directly by Pavia. When Charlemagne conquered most of the Lombard kingdoms, some Umbrian territories were given to the Pope, who established temporal power over them. Some cities acquired a form of autonomy named comune. These cities were frequently at war with each other, often in a context of more general conflicts, either between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire or between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.In the early 14th century, the signorie arose and the most important of them were those of the Vitelli in Città di Castello, of the Baglioni in Perugia and of the Trinci in Foligno, but the region was subsumed by the middle of the same century into the Papal States by Cardinal Albornoz, who in this way prepared the return of the pope from Avignon to Rome. Città di Castello was subsumed later into the Papal States by Cesare Borgia. During the 15th century Renaissance spread in the northern part of the region. It was in this period that humanists started to use again the ancient denomination of "Umbria" to name the area, which until then had been named "Ducato", after the Duchy of Spoleto in the southern part of it. The supremacy of the pope on Umbria was reinforced in 16th century through the erection of a fortress in Perugia by Pope Paul III, named after him Rocca Paolina. The papacy ruled the region uncontested until the end of the 18th century.
Modern history
After the French Revolution and the French conquest of Italy, Umbria became part of the ephemeral Roman Republic and later, part of the Napoleonic Empire under the name of department of Trasimène.After Napoleon's defeat, the Pope regained Umbria and ruled it until 1860. In that year, during Italian Risorgimento, Umbria with Marche and part of Emilia Romagna were annexed by Piedmontese King Victor Emmanuel II, and the people of Perugia destroyed in the same year the Rocca Paolina, symbol of the papal oppression. The region of Umbria, with capital Perugia, became part of the Kingdom of Italy in the following year. The region, whose economy was mainly based on agriculture, experienced a dramatic economic shift at the end of the 19th century with the founding of the Acciaierie di Terni, a major steelwork placed in Terni because of its abundance of electric power due to the Marmore waterfall and its secluded position.
The region of Umbria at the time was somewhat larger than today, comprising Rieti to the south, now part of Lazio. Rieti was detached and added to the province of Rome in 1923. In 1927, the region of Umbria was divided into the provinces of Perugia and Terni.
During WWII, the industrial centers of the region like Terni and Foligno were heavily bombed and in 1944 became a battlefield between the allied forces and the Germans retreating towards the Gothic Line. In 1946, Umbria was incorporated into the Italian Republic as a region, comprising the two provinces of Perugia and Terni.
Geography
Umbria is bordered by Tuscany to the west and the north, Marche to the east and Lazio to the south. Partly hilly and mountainous, and partly flat and fertile owing to the valley of the Tiber, its topography includes part of the central Apennines, with the highest point in the region at Monte Vettore on the border of Marche, at ; the lowest point is Attigliano,. It is the only Italian region having neither a coastline nor a common border with other countries. The comune of Città di Castello has an exclave named Monte Ruperto within Marche. Contained within Umbria is the hamlet of Cospaia, which was a tiny republic from 1440 to 1826, created by accident.Umbria is crossed by two valleys: the Umbrian valley, stretching from Perugia to Spoleto, and the Tiber Valley, north and west of the first one, from Città di Castello to the border with Lazio. The Tiber River forms the approximate border with Lazio, although its source is just over the Tuscan border. The Tiber's three principal tributaries flow southward through Umbria. The Chiascio basin is relatively uninhabited as far as Bastia Umbra. About farther on, it joins the Tiber at Torgiano. The Topino, cleaving the Apennines with passes that the Via Flaminia and successor roads follow, makes a sharp turn at Foligno to flow NW for a few kilometres before joining the Chiascio below Bettona. The third river is the Nera, flowing into the Tiber further south, at Terni; its valley is called the Valnerina. The upper Nera cuts ravines in the mountains; the lower, in the, has created a wide floodplain.
In antiquity, the plain was covered by a pair of shallow, interlocking lakes, the Lacus Clitorius and the Lacus Umber. They were drained by the Romans over several hundred years. An earthquake in the 4th century and the political collapse of the Roman Empire resulted in the refilling of the basin. It was drained a second time, almost a thousand years later, during a 500-year period: Benedictine monks started the process in the 13th century, and the draining was completed in the 18th century.
The eastern part of the region, being crossed by many faults, has been often hit by earthquakes: the last ones have been that of 1997 and those of August and October 2016.
In literature, Umbria is referred to as Il cuore verde d'Italia or The green heart of Italy. The phrase is taken from a poem by Giosuè Carducci, the subject of which is the source of the Clitunno River in Umbria.