The prevailing contour of Perugia is a kind of soft dove grey, which seems appropriate to a place of such venerable seniority. It was there on top of the bluff by the time the Etruscans arrived in the seventh century BC, to make it into one of the chief strongholds of their confederation of twelve cities.

After the empire’s fall, Perugia survived sieges by Goths, Longobards and Byzantines only to grow harder and more determined than ever to hold onto some sort of independence at whatever cost. Her people were – and probably still would be, if again put to test – noted for their ferocity and bravery in combat, and during the early Middle Ages neighbouring cities like Assisi, Gubbio, Spoleto and Todi learned this to their cost, as did Perugia’s Tuscan trade rivals, Arezzo and Siena. When the Aretines hanged some Perugine prisoners with dead cats round their necks and their tunics stuck with the little fish from lake Trasimeno of which they were notoriously fond, Perugia struck back with a bloody revenge, and when the Sienese treid conclusions with her, some fifty of their flags were captured and tied to horses’ tails.

Only the papacy played for time with Perugia, a prize plum which must one day drop into its lap. Freedom, prosperity, a strong currency and a university to rival those of Bologna and Pavia made the Perugines vain and over-confident, and the popes were now able to exploit the factional rivalry between the ordinary citizens and the increasingly powerful nobility. Perugia’s story during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is almost a parody or a pastiche of our wildest fantasies of violence and passion in renaissance Italy.

It was merchants, the Perugine Moneychangers’ Guild, who commissioned Perugino to paint the walls of their Sala del Collegio del Cambio, an immense hall within the Palazzo dei Priori, which stands at the northern end of Corso Vannucci. The Palazzo dei Priori is really a several buildings in one and a separate entrance will take you into the Collegio del Cambio begun in 1452 by Bartolomeo di Mattiolo and Lodovico di Antonibo. It was here, in the vast vaulted audience room surrounded by inlaid wooden benches, that Pietro Perugino set to work on his splendid fresco cycle in 1496.

The idea for this sequence of paintings is, you might say, the central concept of renaissance humanism, that of an attempt to fuse the best impulses of classical antiquity with the essential values of the Christian world. At Perugia the inspiration belonged to Francesco Matarazzo, the city’s greatest chronicler, a lecturer in the university and secretary to the ten priors. He it was who devised the sequence of ancient wothies (Cato, Socrates, Trajan, Horatius and Pericles), the allegorical figures (Temperance, Fortitude and Prudence), the pagan gods and goddesses and the six sybils whose prophecies were held to have foretold Christ’s birth. It was Matarazzo who also devised the series of Christian icons (Isaiah, Moses, Daniel and David), and the scenes of the Nativity and the Transfiguration.

It is hard to imagine a better guide than this to what the men and women of the Renaissance set out to achieve, and the poignancy of this vision of a peaceable kingdom of pagan and Christian is all the greater when we consider that it was planned and painted during one of the most turbulent and bloodthirsty moment’s in Perugia’s history, when the city’s inhabitants were violating almost daily the sanctity of those ideals implied by the Collegio del Cambio’s frescoes. This was the time of Grifonetto Baglioni’s gran tradimento and of his cousin Gianpaolo’s terrible revenge, when he decorated the palazzo with traitor’s heads and with portraits of them hanging upside down, a time when the streets ran with blood and no man knew who might next be his enemy.

Yet Perugino’s frescoes, in which he was assisted by his pupils Andrea d’Assisi and the young Raphael, are suffused with an extraordinary gentleness and choreographic elegance. The sybils pose like women just leaving a dance-floor, still feeling as it were the pattern of the steps they have been treading. The emperors and generals and prophets have slender, feminine hands and, as one Victorian commentator remarks, “their long, limp bodies would have fallen as field flowers fall before the scythe or even a summer shower”. They are far removed in spirit from the worldly, bullying churchmen who were keenly eyeing Perugia with a view to catching it up into their domains.

You can see Perugino’s self-portrait in a panel on the right-hand wall, pug-nosed, thin-lipped, triple-chinned and not at all like the kind of person modern cliché has taught us to think of as artistic. This is fulfilled instead by the representation, among the prophets, of the youthful Daniel, with his straggling blond curls and immense brown eyes, a figure convincingly claimed to represent the young Raphael.

Outside the Palazzo dei Priori, in Piazza IV Novembre stands one of Perugia’s best loved work of art, the Fontana Maggiore, designed in 1275-7 by Nicola Pisano and his son Giovanni working with Fra Bevignate. The fountain’s outer basin is decorated with twenty-four white marble bas-reliefs, showing the months of the year, a wimpled dame out falconing, Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf, and scenes from Aesop’s fables. The inner basin carries Giovanni Pisano’s beautiful series of caryatids, two of which are portraits of contemporary figures, Matteo da Correggio, the podestà of the day, and Ermanno de Sassoferrato, another civic official known as the Capitano del Popolo. The work is crowned by Giovanni’s group of three water nymphs, apparently the oldest piece of bronze casting to survive from the Middle Ages.

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 ploughman, called from his team to become a priest; the ox-goad he had thrown aside when he went towards his new vocation was found miraculously to have burgeoned into an ilex tree, while 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.