Luxury Travel in Assisi: Olive Groves, Stone Walls and the Umbrian Table
Walk out of Porta Nuova at the end of October and the air smells of crushed olives and woodsmoke. Below the walls, the terraces that climb Monte Subasio are alive with pickers, nets spread beneath the silver-green trees, ladders leaning into branches that have been tended for centuries. This is the quiet season in Assisi, […]
Assisi in Late Autumn: A Luxury Travel Guide to the Season’s Best
By the third week of October, the pink limestone of Assisi turns the colour of honey at four in the afternoon, the first smoke rises from the stone ovens in the lanes below the walls, and the crowds of high summer have thinned to something closer to the town’s true rhythm. For travellers who prefer […]
Why Refined Travellers Choose a Luxury Hotel in Assisi
At the hour when the stone of the Basilica turns the colour of honey, Assisi falls quiet. Swifts wheel above the rooftops, the bells of the lower town answer one another across the Umbrian valley, and the day-trippers have long since returned to their coaches. This is the Assisi that only those who stay will […]
Hand-Pointed Stone: Restoring Our Luxury Hotel in Assisi
It is early morning in a vaulted room beneath one of our two historic buildings in Assisi. A single work light rakes across a wall of pale and rose-tinted limestone, and a master mason, bucket at his feet, is pressing lime mortar into the joints with the flat of a trowel. He works as masons […]
The Via di Francesco: Assisi’s Ancient Pilgrim Road
Before dawn, the stone underfoot on Via San Francesco is still cool from the night, and the only sound is the scrape of a walking pole against thirteenth-century paving. Within the hour, the first pilgrims of the day will round the corner below the Basilica, packs on their backs, following a route that has led […]
The Town Is the Hotel: Luxury Hospitality Reimagined in Assisi
By seven in the evening the coaches have gone. The last day visitors wind down toward the car parks below the walls, and Via San Francesco — the street that has carried travellers toward the Basilica since the thirteenth century — falls quiet. This is the hour the street belongs to the people who stayed. […]
Unstitch and Sew: The Ancient Craft Behind Our Assisi Restoration
There is a room in Building 19 that we did not know existed in this form. For centuries it wore a skin of plaster, flat and pale and unremarkable, the sort of surface you walk past without a second thought. Then, one morning this summer, the masons finished stripping it back — and the room […]
Beneath the Stones of Assisi: The Roman City Under a Franciscan Town
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 […]
The Doors of the Dead: Reading the Medieval Houses of Assisi
Walk up Via San Francesco early in the morning, before the coaches arrive and while the limestone is still cool, and you will begin to notice them. Set into the façades of the oldest houses, a metre or so above the pavement, are narrow arched openings — too tall to be windows, too high to […]
Autumn in Assisi: A Luxury Traveller’s Guide to the Centenary Season
By the middle of September, the light over Assisi changes. The white flare of August softens into something lower and warmer, and the limestone of Monte Subasio — the same stone that built the town — turns the colour of pale honey in the late afternoon. The tour coaches thin out. The Piazza del Comune, […]