Killester

Umbria is a land whose rolling hills are dotted with castles, fortresses and watchtowers, whose well-preserved hill towns produce world-renowned handmade ceramics, whose many monasteries were founded by a host of local saints, whose valleys are laced with countless gleaming rivers and host Italy’s largest lake. In Umbria, halfway up the slopes of Monte Fumaiolo, a trickle seeps out of the ground and wanders southward, gaining breadth and notoriety to become Rome’s mighty Tiber. Any traveler who goes from Florence to Rome by land passes through the Tiber Valley, whose Umbrian locales include such towns as Assisi, Spoleto and Orvieto.

Umbria offers a good quality of grapes, favoured by the favourable climatic and soil conditions of the region.  Many excellent wines come from Umbria, like the Grechetto, wine of ancient traditions, lauded by Pliny the Elder, the Rosso of Montfalco, a purple coloured wine with a harmonious and velvety flavour, the Sagrantino Passito, of ruby red colour and delicate aroma, and the Orvieto Classico, the white wine which was already famous in Etruscan times.

In tourist literature one sometimes sees Umbria called il cuor verde d’Italia (the green heart of Italy). The phrase, taken from a poem by Giosuè Carducci — the subject of which is not Umbria but rather a specific place in it, the source of the Clitunno river, treasured as a beauty spot — is to a certain extent appropriate since the modern administrative region is the only one to have neither a coast nor a border with a foreign country, and, except for August and September, is famously green.

Umbria is a region of Central Italy, bordered by Tuscany to the west, the Marche to the east and Lazio to the south. This region is mostly hilly or mountainous