Post: Holding a Grudge about Salt and Leaning into Chocolate

When the American colonists threw tea into the Boston Harbor to protest taxes, they eventually won a war and forgave the British. I’m really glad, because I drink tea every day.

Perugia, the capital and largest city of the Umbrian region, did not have the same experience when the Papal state started to heavily tax salt in the 1540s, and the citizens stopped buying salt in protest. To this day, the region does not salt its bread. (The flavor takes some getting used to— or not, because if you eat the bread with something salty, everything in your mouth turns out just fine.)

So, what accounts for the vastly different outcomes in tax protests? Some people, Italian-Americans among them, might make reference to a culture with a long memory. Or an innate ability to hold a grudge. This could be true.

What really may account for the holding a grudge so long, though, is being on the losing end. And the papal state brought loss in a huge way.

When the citizens stopped buying salt, Pope Paul sent an army. Unlike “polite” King George who just sailed into New York harbor and tried to win a “regular” war, the pope’s army moved into the nicest neighborhood in town, displaced homes, streets and buildings, and build an immense fort on top of it.

This is called Rocca Paolina, and the fort stayed in place until the unification of Italy in the 1860s. It was literally build on the land that the ancient Etruscans and Ancient Romans used for the city. By the 1540s, the wealthy and powerful had their homes and shops there. So, to make his point, the Pope used their homes as the foundation for his huge fort, built so he could keep his eye on the salt-free Perugians.

Centuries later, after Italy was unified, the city thought it was safe to take down the fort. This is also fascinating in terms of long memory! Apparently, the land was not immediately put to another use, and the area was cordoned off until in the 1970s the city decided to make a sort of passage museum out of it.

We entered the area, which is still called Rocca Paolina (Paul’s fort) by going down a few escalators. Once we emerged, we were in darkened old stone passages and these led to rooms off the sides. The passages were middle age streets, and the side rooms, homes or businesses. The layout of that part of the city had been preserved- yet another testament to the engineering of the Etruscans, Romans, and medieval Perugians. I highly recommend this area as a visit to anyone visiting Perugia. The history is so interesting, and being in the environment of the ancient walls and streets is unique.

Our city tour continued with a walk around the main plazas of Perugia. The largest plaza has the cathedral on one side and government buildings on the other side, with the main fountain in the middle. This was described as a symbolic separation of church and state. The outside of the cathedral was described to us as unfinished in the sense that it was unornamented. Due to its high cost, construction of the cathedral was suspended for about 100 years in the early Middle Ages, Once it began again, it took of course, about another 100 to complete. At that point, the city had grown up around the area where the narthex door would have been. The plaza side was still available for an entrance, so this cathedral is entered from the side, which is very unusual, and a little disorienting. It has a high ornamented baroque style inside, and I will say it doesn’t rise to my list of favorite spaces.

There is another story connected to the salt tax protest though, that I does make me grin. As the papal contingent was approaching the city, the council knew they would have to turn over the keys to the city. (A medieval walled city had literal keys that unlocked actual doors, after all.) They didn’t want to give up the keys, naturally, and knew they would be taken away. So, the leaders built the keys into a crucifix and hung the life size crucifix above the cathedral door, facing out. A win for Perugia! There was no way the papal contingent would take the keys away from Jesus on the cross!

Our city tour included lots of examples of typical Perugian and Umbrian food. We were released for lunch on our own, so Mark and I tasted our way around this part of the city. We sampled a porchetta sandwich, which I really liked. The cart has been selling porchetta in the square for decades. The large pork roll has a crispy outside and lots of herbs inside. When the sandwich is composed, the carver takes great care to make sure the sandwich has all three layers— outside, middle and herbed center.

We moved across the street to share a second special sandwich called a torta testone. This is made with a special round bread that has only flour and water for ingredients (no salt, of course, and no yeast, but maybe it is sourdough?). It is a risen bread and cut for a sandwich.

We trotted off to a bakery to try some little cookies called fave di … These are special for All Souls Day (or Halloween, which is not traditional but is catching on here. ) They tasted like they were made with almond paste.

Perugia is the home of Perugina chocolates, which make the famous Bacia chocolates. The company was the idea and work of Louisa Spagnoli, starting in the 1920s. I want to learn more about her. Eventually the company was sold, and then sold again, to Nestle. It’s a bit unfortunate, and cost local people jobs as the factory became more mechanize. That said, all Bacia are made in Italy.

We steered away from Bacia since even buying them in the States would be the same candy. Perugia has a chocolate festival each fall, called Eurochocolate, and it had just ended. We visited a couple of other shops to try chocolate that was labeled local and artisanal.

Now very full, we were ready to join a walking tour of other parts of the city for a couple of hours. The district we walked through is the home of many students. Perugia has a great university that is centuries old. Lots of windows had washing out to dry.

We walked to the Templar church. Everything I know about Knights Templar I learned from Da Vinci Code and had mostly forgotten. The church is pretty though. It is round, and does have “mysterious” symbols like a Star of David on one cobblestone. It has a very plain stone altar, and the stone came from Greece. The columns are reclaimed from the Romans. Finally, the church does lie on the “line” of the Archangel Michael, which starts in Ireland and ends in Israel. After leaving the church, my life, was exactly the same as before.

One more church on the tour was to see a church of St. Benedict. St. Francis gets a lot of attention around here, but Perugia and Assisi are rivals. The church to St. Francis was only allowed to be built outside of the main walls, and is not a functioning church any more. It’s part of a music school and had groups of students sitting on the grass around it like at many college campuses. St. Benedict’s church is right next door, and the interesting piece here was a painting of a Madonna with the medieval city of Perugia at the bottom.

This painting was made before the salt tax boycott, meaning that it allows historians know what the city looked like before Rocca Paolina! It must have been striking. It was a city of towers. Wealthy families built towers as a show of wealth and to help visitors find them. Eventually this also meant enemies could find them, and the practice slowed down a bit. The pope’s contingent had these stones to dismantle and work with though, when they arrived to build the fort.

The end of the walk took us over Roman aqueducts, which is like walking over a bridge. The views of the walls of the houses and rooftops still fascinates me.

We had just enough time to find gelato— our best so far, from a shop called Grome. I had fig and pistachio flavors and told the clerk it was my favorite gelato in Italy.; A true statement as of today.

We had a group dinner at an osteria decorated with bicycles on the ceiling. Their specialties are homemade potato chips and pasta carbonara. We were also served eggs cooked with mushrooms, cold cuts, and slow roasted pork and potatoes.

Salt or not, it was our most lavish eating day so far, and a very entertaining and interesting one, especially in terms of medieval civil disobedience. I could spend more days in Perugia, without a doubt.