Cesi, the Breathing Mountain Above the Terni Basin

A road climbs quickly from the asphalt of State Road 79, almost impatient to leave behind the traffic of the Terni Basin. Then silence: olive trees, cicadas, and suddenly the walls of Cesi, a medieval village at 429 metres above the Tyrrhenian Sea, perched on the flank of Monte Eolo like a swallow's nest on a stone windowsill.

The breathing mountain

What makes Cesi a place out of the ordinary lies in the rock fissures beneath the village: in summer, cool breezes emerge from them; in winter, they blow warm like the breath of a giant. Not magic, but geology: a system of karst cavities that regulates air temperature. Hence the nickname, the breathing mountain. Locals take advantage by sitting on the stone walls on August evenings, when Terni swelters down in the valley and up here you need a jacket.

Seven churches and a forgotten masterpiece

For a village of just a few hundred souls, Cesi boasts seven churches. The most precious is Santa Maria Assunta, where the Master of Cesi — an Umbrian painter of the early fourteenth century — left in 1308 a dossal with a Madonna Enthroned Among Saints of rare chromatic delicacy. At Palazzo Stocchi, sixteenth-century frescoes of the local school survive; Palazzo Contelori tells instead of the centuries when Cesi was an autonomous municipality, until its merger in 1927.

Carsulae, the Umbrian Pompeii

Four kilometres down on the plain, along the old Via Flaminia, stretch the ruins of Carsulae: amphitheatre, theatre, basilica, the Arch of San Damiano, and stretches of Roman paving stones that no tour operator has yet put in their packages. Admission is nearly free, crowds virtually absent, and the feeling — walking among lichen-covered stones — of having an entire city from the first century BC all to yourself.

When to go and how

Spring and autumn are the perfect seasons: the air is crisp and the colours of the valleys below the viewpoint recall a Sienese landscape. Cesi is about 10 kilometres from Terni, reachable by car in a quarter of an hour. There are no starred restaurants, but a family-run trattoria serves truffle tagliatelle and roast pigeon — dishes that cost less than a pizza night out in the city.