Avoiding the major centres, these tours concentrate on a selection of the smaller towns and cities – the centri minori – of Umbria and Tuscany. Spread across the heart of Italy, these regions contain a disproportionately large quantity of what the country is most loved for: ancient streetscape crammed onto hilltops, exquisitely undulating countryside of olive, cypress and vine, and an abundance of wonderful art.

Rarely can the spirit of the Middle Ages be so potently felt as in the hill towns of central Italy. That such small communities could have built each dwelling so massively, raised churches and public buildings of such magnificence and created works of art of such monumentality inspires awe bordering on disbelief among today’s visitors.

This is also the heartland of the Renaissance, and several of the leading artists of the era were natives who worked here before being inveigled to the great metropolises of Florence and Rome.

Many of the most important and beautiful of Italy’s incomparable patrimony of paintings and frescos are included on this tour. The great Giottesque cycle at Assisi stands at the beginning of the modern era of art, Piero della Francesca’s Arezzo frescoes are among the greatest achievements of the Early Renaissance and the Last Judgement frescoes by Signorelli in Orvieto are on the cusp of the High Renaissance. While in the field of architecture Romanesque and Gothic predominate, there are many major Renaissance buildings, including the centrally-planned churches at Todi and Montepulciano.

The man-made environment melds with the natural in a picturesque union of intense beauty. It is a landscape of rumpled hills, sometimes rugged and forested, sometimes tamed in the struggle to cultivate, always speckled with ancient farmsteads, fortified villages and isolated churches. Even from the central piazze of many of these towns there are views of countryside which seems scarcely to have changed for centuries.