Narni

Narni lent its name to a wardrobe's other world. C. S. Lewis, browsing a classical atlas, found the Latin "Narnia" — this Umbrian hill town's ancient name — and borrowed it for his chronicles: the connection is documented, and the town embraces it with statues, a festival of fantasy and the pleasure of pilgrims arriving from the imagination. The real Narnia repays them in kind: a stone town on its cliff above the Nera gorge, where the Rocca Albornoz watches, the Romanesque cathedral guards its saints, and the underground city — convent cellars, a Roman cistern, and the Inquisition's cell scratched with a prisoner's enigmatic graffiti — makes the region's most gripping subterranean visit.

Rome built grandly here: the Ponte d'Augusto's surviving arch, once among the empire's mightiest bridges, broods over the river as it did when Corot painted it into landscape history. Each spring the Corsa all'Anello returns the town to the fourteenth century — quarters in costume, riders lancing at the ring, weeks of taverns and processions that rank among Umbria's great medieval festivals.

The geographic centre of Italy is marked in the commune's countryside, a fitting conceit for a town equidistant between history and story. Gattamelata, Donatello's bronzed condottiere, was born in these lanes. A lion of legend, an arch of empire: Narni's doors open both ways.