In 1499 the equivocal, enigmatic Lucrezia Borgia came to inhabit the castle of Spoleto. The fair but unholy Lucrezia was a wandering, restless being who liked apparently to be continually on the move.
Here, in the fortress of Spoleto, Lucrezia Borgia, coming straight from the Vatican, held for a brief year the seals of the state in her frail hands, her father at the time being governor.
The aspect of this grim fortress-château, grim but livable, as one knows from the historical accounts, is to-day, so far as outlines are concerned, just as it was five centuries ago. It is grandiose, severe and majestic, and is dominant in all the landscape round about, not even its mountain background dwarfing its proportions. The military defence was that portion lying lowest down in the valley, while the residence of the governor was in the upper portion. One reads the history of three distinct epochs in its architecture, the Gothic of the fifteenth century, that of the sixteenth, and the later interpolated Renaissance decorations.
Through Foligno and Assisi runs the road to Perugia. Assisi is a much visited shrine, but Foligno is remembered by most of those who have travelled that way only as a grimy railway junction.
Assisi, the little Umbrian hill town, is deservedly the popular shrine that it is. Assisi is a religious shrine, but its skyline silhouette is more like that which properly belongs to a warlike stronghold. The city of St. Francis is loved by men of all creeds who recall the story of the holy man who, with poverty as a garment, trod his long way, singing, talking to the birds and succouring all who were sore or heavy laden.
Immense antiquity is suggested by everything round about, from the tombs of the Etruscan Necropolis, dating from 150 B.C., down to the triple-storied convent church of San Francesco of 1230 and the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli of 1509.