IN a hotel on the edge of the wine town of Orvieto a hotel fashioned out of a 12th century monastery, with cloisters for contemplation, a prie dieu by the bed and a tiramisu of unparalleled wickedness for pudding it struck me. Umbria is an occasion of sin.
It calls itself "the land of saints and painters" a fair enough description for a necklace of medieval hilltop towns encircling exquisite cathedrals. "The green heart of Italy" is another marketing line for this plump province lodged between Tuscany and Rome, fed by the main north south artery, the Autostrada del Sole. The truth is that Umbria is Italy's well filled stomach. You may struggle all you like to fix your mind on higher things Grotto's 28 ethereal frescoes, say, in the upper church at Assisi but baser appetites intervene. In the dining room of a very middle of the road restaurant next to a motorway, come to think of it stands a trolley with 25 varieties of Umbrian extra virgin olive oil. This is a paradise for gluttons.
Simple, honest to goodness gluttony, mind you none of your fiddly Michelin manoeuvres. "Umbrians can relate as humbly as Franciscans how they eat only what their good earth provides, says the wine writer Hugh Johnson. Cucina tipicha are the key words for a simple style of cooking involving great haunches of ham, coils of meaty sausage and anything from a wild boar to a wood pigeon twirling on a spit.
For antipasto rustica, the favourite lead in to the feast, there is no cooking at all merely the provision of a very sharp knife with which to attack assorted goodies from Norcia in the east. This sleepy little town" is famous for two things St Benedict, born there in 480 AD, and pork, produced in such prodigious quantities that the Italian word for pork butcher, norcineria, derives from this very spot. Benedict's monks learned so much from Norcia's butchers about how to wield the knife that they founded a local college of surgeons one of whose number was dispatched to perform a cataract operation on Elizabeth I in 1578.
The butchers are still in business, with chains of sausages of every size and shape dangling at their doors. It was a mistake to inquire about the details of their origin and be taken behind the scenes by Lanzi, a major producer, past piles of porcine innards so alarming as to threaten the pleasure of pigging out on Italian salami for evermore. An unwise move for anybody determined to taste the Umbrian speciality, budellacci pork intestines smoked on the griddle.
On to calmer landscapes further east. On the great, flat plain of Castellucio, the eerie and silent set for Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon, they produce nothing to get steamed up about except tasty little green lentils.
But the star ingredient of Umbrian cooking the buried treasure that gourmet fortune hunters relentlessly seek is the truffle. Wherever you travel you will find it in black and white, sprinkled across menus but nowhere as liberally as in Spoleto, where it is possible to begin a tasting menu with truffles on toast, progress to black truffle risotto and on through five more foodie celebrations of the subterranean fungus until dinner ends with a glass of Grappa al Tartufo.
The only possible preparation for this marathon is an hour or two walking the steeply stepped streets of the town a fairy tale beauty, magically balanced on a mountain top. "Spoleto I think the most romantic city I ever saw," Shelley wrote in 1818. Eight years later, William Hazlitt concurred, albeit with a slightly barbed aside "Spoleto is a handsome town, delightfully situated, and has an appearance (somewhat startling in Italy) as if life were not quite extinct in it."
This is a bit rough, considering the number of octogenarian Spoletans who step effortlessly up the hill from the pale, gleaming cathedral while tourists pant and stop, pretending to consult their guidebooks. It is down in the church itself that the books serve their purpose, filling in the background to the frescoes in the apse by the great Florentine painter monk Fra Filippo Lippi.
Soon after the completion of the last one, the Coronation of the Virgin in 1469, he died poisoned, not by an accidental overdose of truffles but as punishment for having seduced the daughter of a noble family.
In Perugia, not far to the north Pope Martin IV apparently died after eating too many eels. This was a peaceable enough end to come to in a town with the reputation, from earliest times right through the Middle Ages, of being the most warlike in Italy.
Perugia was also the birthplace of the Flagellants, who whipped half of Europe into a religious frenzy in the late 13th century. But the pope's overdose of eels seems more in tune with the present mood of a place where students sunbathe on the town hall steps, and where the fruit tart in the window of Sandri's glittering old pasticcheria on the Corso Vannucci is the size of a coffee table.
All this gorgeous gastronomic self indulgence needs a drop of decent wine. Ten kilometres south of Perugia you will find it, in a gentle landscape where the Tiber meanders through olive groves and vineyards like a humble country river. Giorgio Lungarotti, the man who put Umbrian wine making on the map more than 30 years ago, is based in Torgiano, in Le Tre Vaselle the medieval town house he has turned into wine museum, shop, smart hotel and mouthwatering restaurant. You may spot him there at his favourite table very elderly now but not too frail to enjoy a glass of his own excellent Rubeseo.
Umbria's best known wine, Orvieto, can be pleasant and nutty or colourless and bland. Either way, it deserves to be drunk on its home ground, because tile town of Orvieto, perched on a table top of black volcanic rock, is one of the loveliest hill towns of all. For one thing it is traffic free, unlike some of its rivals, so that visitors can stroll through its narrow old streets without a Fiat suddenly ripping along between the walls like a freshly discharged cannonball. For another, it has at its heart the golden lily of Italian cathedrals one so magnificent, with its facade of shimmering mosaic, that some entranced prelate declared it would float up to heaven on Judgment Day, carried aloft by its own beauty.
All this, and the Byzantine riches of Assisi, and the curious town of Gubbio whose inhabitants race round the streets every May.
5th cheering the carriers of three enormous, phallic wooden candles. In late spring, Umbria's lush green meadows are splashed red with poppies by summer the countryside is softer still, its contours blurred in a silvery haze. If all looks delectable. Tuscany, eat your heart out.