Stand in Piazza del Comune at eight in the morning, before the first coaches arrive, and the square feels like the calm centre of a medieval town. Six Corinthian columns rise on the north side, weathered to the colour of old ivory, holding up a pediment that has watched over this space for two thousand years. Most visitors photograph them and move on toward the Basilica. Very few take the small doorway a few steps away, descend a flight of stairs, and discover that the piazza they were just standing in is a roof — that beneath the paving stones lies another square, another street, another Assisi, four metres down and considerably older. Assisi is not a town with Roman remains. It is a Roman town with a Franciscan city built on top of it.
Asisium: A City Built on Terraces
Long before Francis, before the Basilica, before the pink stone of Monte Subasio was quarried for the great upper church, this hillside was already inhabited. Umbrian peoples settled these slopes around 1000 BC, choosing high fortified ground above the Tiber valley. Etruscan influence followed from roughly 450 BC, and by 295 BC Rome had taken control of central Italy. The city the Romans built here they called Asisium, and in 89 BC it was elevated to the status of municipium — a town of Roman citizens, with its own magistrates and its own civic ambition.
What makes Asisium remarkable is not that it existed, but how it was built. The Romans did not flatten the mountain; they worked with it. The city was constructed as a sequence of artificial terraces cut into the flank of Monte Subasio, each level retained by masonry, each supporting a different civic function. The upper eastern zone held the defensive walls, a monumental cistern, and a sanctuary to Cupra Mater — an Etruscan goddess of love and fertility who, when Latin became the official language, was quietly renamed Bona, the Roman Venus. The lower western zone opened into a broad public square with a fountain.
That terraced logic never went away. It is the reason Assisi still reads the way it does today: a town of horizontal bands stacked up a mountainside, connected by steep transverse lanes, every street a different altitude with a different view. When you walk from the Basilica up toward the Rocca and feel the town rising in distinct shelves beneath your feet, you are walking a Roman engineering decision made more than two thousand years ago. Medieval Assisi did not replace that plan. It inherited it, and built in stone on top of it.
The Rooms Seven Metres Below
The most direct way to understand this is to go underground. Beneath Piazza del Comune, reached through the Romanesque crypt of the former church of San Nicolò “de platea”, lies the Roman Forum of Asisium — not a reconstruction, but the actual civic centre of the ancient town, preserved beneath the modern square. The original limestone paving is still there, laid in great local slabs. So is the podium with its seats for magistrates, the base of the temple with its access doors to the porch, a monumental cistern, a small tetrastyle temple to the Dioscuri, and the tabernae — the commercial spaces where Asisium did its daily business. You are standing on the floor where a Roman merchant stood. The distance between the two is a few metres of accumulated centuries.
Above ground, the temple facade that dominates the piazza has long been called the Temple of Minerva, though scholars now associate it more securely with other dedications. Since 1539 it has housed the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, given a Baroque interior in the seventeenth century. The result is one of Italy’s most eloquent architectural sentences: Roman columns, a Christian church, a medieval square, all in a single glance. Goethe, arriving in 1786, famously cared more about this temple than about the Basilica.
Then there are the private houses. Beneath the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, three adjoining rooms of a Roman domus were uncovered in 1864 and excavated more thoroughly a century later. Their walls carry graffiti — including verses of poetry, one of which refers to a domus musae, the house of the Muse. Assisi is generally regarded as the birthplace of the Latin elegiac poet Propertius, born around 50–45 BC, and the temptation to connect the two has proved irresistible for over a century, even though no archaeological proof exists. Nearby, seven metres below street level under Palazzo Giampè, the Domus del Larario preserves something rarer still: standing Roman walls four metres high in every room, with mosaics and frescoes recently restored. Outside Rome and Pompeii, that state of preservation is close to unheard of. It can be viewed only from above, precisely to protect it. Both domus are open by reservation, with a combined ticket of around €10 — one of the great underpriced experiences in Italian travel.
Why Layers Matter to What We Are Building
We think about this constantly at Via San Francesco Assisi, the hotel diffuso we are creating in two historic buildings a few minutes from the Basilica. Restoration in a town like this is never a matter of choosing a period and freezing it. Our fourteenth-century former convent, The Convent, is not purely fourteenth-century; it is a fourteenth-century idea resting on older masonry, adapted in the sixteenth, altered in the nineteenth, and now being read carefully by us in the twenty-first. When our restorers open a wall, the question is rarely “what was here?” but “how many things were here, and which of them still speaks?”
The vaulted room in the photograph above is a case in point. Stripped back to its stone, lit from the floor, it shows a barrel vault and a slender arched window that no guest would have seen under the plaster and false ceilings we inherited. We did not add that vault. We uncovered it — and then had to decide, as the Romans did on their terraces, how to build with what the mountain and the centuries had already given us. Authentic luxury in Assisi is not invented. It is disclosed. The finest boutique hotel in Umbria, we believe, is not the one that imposes the most, but the one that removes most intelligently.
Walking the Older City
If you visit Assisi before we open in 2028, we would suggest one small change to the usual itinerary. Give the Basilica the morning it deserves — then spend an afternoon underground. The Roman Forum, the two domus, the surviving stretches of the defensive walls built between 150 and 100 BC: together they take perhaps three hours and cost less than a museum ticket in a capital city. You will emerge into Piazza del Comune understanding exactly why the square is where it is, why the town climbs in the pattern it climbs, and why every wall here is older than it looks.
We are documenting our own restoration as it happens — the discoveries, the decisions, the arguments with our own preconceptions. Follow the project and subscribe to our journal to watch two historic buildings in the heart of Assisi become, slowly and carefully, a hotel worthy of the ground it stands on.