Montefalco is known as la Ringhiera dell’Umbria, the balcony of Umbria, it is one of those places from which, once arrived, you can see no reason to move, and you can easily find yourself echoing the rhapsodic outburst of the early twentieth-century travel writer Edward Hutton, who declared: “Her unfrequented streets seem still to shine with the beautiful footsteps of the saints; her aspect is that of some mystical hermit whose face is flushed with some marvellous sweet thought of God, whose eyes search heaven for His advent”.

You enter Montefalco through the fifteenth-century Porta Spoletina, passing the dull neo-classical church of San Leonardo and the much more interesting renaissance Santa Illuminata. The side chapels demonstrate the range of discerning patronage extended by the citizens to Umbrian artists in the early sixteenth century. As well as the work of Tiberio d’Assisi and Mezzastris, you will discover, in the second and third chapels on the right, frescoes by Montefalco’s own master, Francesco Melanzio who shows the influence of Perugino on a technique formed from a study of such earlier masters as Nicolò Alunno and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo.

At the top of the streets, Santa Chiara commemorates one of the town’s eight saints, Chiara di Damiano, an Augustinian nun. Built in 1600 by Fabio Tempestivi, the dignified brick structure, with its felicitous little lantern above the cupola, incorporates the much older cappella di Santa Croce, frescoed by an anonymous but highly distinctive painter. This unknown artist included the French donor, Jean d’Amiel, in the upper panel on the right-hand wall, showing him being introduced to Christ by St. Blaise and St. Catherine. In the adjacent convent you will be shown Chiara’s mummified heart, the tiny surgical instruments which extracted it from her body and a crucifix set with three of her gallstones.

Now you can see the town’s old ramparts and the Porta San Bartolomeo. Behind the romanesque church, follow via Melanzio up to Corso Mameli, where the delicate ogival cusps and column-clusters of Sant’Agostino confront you. There is plenty of absorbing fifteenth-century fresco here, mostly by unnamed Umbrian masters reflecting the styles of such Gubbian painters as Ottaviano Nelli; half-way up the left side of the nave, Giovanni Battista Caporali placed a rough-looking St. James and a suavely classical St. John as attendants to a throned Madonna backed by a landscape with a seaport and a towered city.

The street takes up into Piazza del Comune, once known as Campo del Certame (field of the contest) after the tournaments which took place here. The fascinatingly irregular shape of this “square”, so different from the carefully planned rectangles we are accustomed to finding at the heart of an Italian city, suggests something truly ancient, the clearing in the forest, the open space among tribal huts, from which the concept of the piazza derives.

On the west side, the Palazzo Comunale, with its gothic windows and renaissance portico, houses a library based on manuscripts from the town’s religious houses, suppressed, like those throughout Italy, in 1860, and its tower looks out towards Perugia in on direction and Spoleto in the other. Close by is Montefalco’s little theatre, which began as an eighteenth-century oratory and was adapted to secular uses only in 1869. opposite this there is an excellent wine shop, which seems to sell every kind of Umbrian vintage you could possibly wish to sample, including the Montefalchese Sagrantino, Piegaro and the appropriately named Scacciadiavoli (“chase away devils”).

From here turn right into via Ringhiera, where the large medieval church of San Francesco has been turned into a picture gallery. Built in 1336-38, it witnessed the first miracle of St. Bridget of Sweden, whose children where taking her dead body back to their native country in 1373. for some reason they had not wished to speak with a hermit who had been among her devoted companions, but the corpse, lying in this church at Montefalco, rose from its bier, embraced the pious anchorite and signed to its recalcitrant offsprings to do the same. After the suppression of the Franciscan convent, the building had to wait forty years for conversion, in 1895, into a gallery; the simple “preaching barn” structure remains flanked by a series of fifteenth-century chapels which create a sort of south aisle.

The wealth of different schools and styles here cannot easily be discussed in detail, but among individual painting you should seek out Francesco Melanzio’s lavish altar-piece with saints – a swaggering squire, a demure nun and a fleshy-faced monk – like charachters from Boccaccio, and a sublime saintly trio by the Roman painter Antoniazzio, whose work you will also find at Amelia and Perugia.

Most beautiful of all are the frescoes on the life os St. Francis in the first chapel on the right and in the apse of the choir, executed by Benozzo Gozzoli in 1452. A Tuscan best known for his work in Florence and San Gimignano, Gozzoli is one of those painters who seem to exist for the purpose of having patronizing remarks made about them by experts in the field of renaissance art. It is always implied  that he was, in the end, little better than a gifted decorator, and account is rarely taken of his evident enjoyment of colour and narrative for their own sake. At Montefalco he is at his cheerful best, whether in such details as the pair of prattling children in the scene of Francis stripping naked before his father, and the clothes at the bedside of the sleeping saint, or in the enchantingly individualized portraits of the great Franciscan which run in a garlanded frieze beneath the panels of fresco.

The Monastery of San Fortunato, on the outskirts of Montefalco, seems merely another element of a subtly harmonized landscape. One of the oldest religious foundations in central Italy, it was originally built by a soldier named Severus and consecrated to house the body of St. Fortunatus, the evangelist of the district. This Fortunatus was a plougman, called from his team to become a priest; the oax-goad he had thrown aside when he went towards his new vocation was found miraculously to have burgeoned into an ilex tree, whise shoots were used as charms against devils. When the church was rebuilt, Benozzo Gozzoli was commissioned to paint the frescoes surrounding the main doorway, including the charming lunette of the Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Bernardino and two angels, as well as others inside which now survive only fragments.