I live in Italy — this Umbrian village is one of my best discoveries

Times

8 hours ago

Every autumn, the people of Umbria reach for their rakes and head for the hills. There they come together for an ancestral ritual: the olive harvest. For centuries this was papal territory and, fittingly, this is a rite of self-sacrifice and resurrection. The olives are collected by sweaty hand, using those rakes to shake down bunches at a time; then they are transfigured into a sacred nectar.
Here the harvest isn't just about preparing for the year ahead; it's a bonding event where families work together to create something unique. After the toil comes joy: a picnic under the centuries-old trees. It's the creation of community — and it all starts with a simple rake.
Rastrello is Italian for rake, and Rastrello is what Christiane Wassmann named her hotel when she opened a nine-room Umbrian retreat in 2020 in a 14th-century house in Panicale, a sleepy medieval village perched on a hill overlooking Lake Trasimeno, an hour's drive west of Perugia.
'It symbolises the harvest when we all come together under the trees,' she told me over a blind tasting of olive oils when I visited in June. That sense of kinship, of simple pleasures shared, is what she wanted to instil in the guests of her hotel.
Of course, communities grow and so has Rastrello. In May Wassmann opened a garden annexe — the neighbouring house, adding a further seven rooms. As homes, the buildings used to be separated by gardens; today they're connected by an outdoor area comprising the farm-to-table restaurant, Cucina & Giardino, and — new for 2025 — a tiny plunge pool, perfect for Panicale's scorching summer days.
The rooms (all named after local olive varieties) are beautifully back to basics: exposed stone walls and beams, terracotta floors and local pietra serena stone in the bathrooms, matched with furniture picked out from local antiques markets and brightly patterned headboards upcycled from car upholstery. All have views unspooling down Panicale's hillside towards Lake Trasimeno; some have balconies, hoisted over the cypress trees that were planted here by local families in memory of their children lost in the First World War.
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Wassmann — who first visited Umbria when her parents moved here in 1995 — is obsessed with olives. A city slicker who has swapped Central America (she was born in Nicaragua) for central Italy, now living between Panicale and Miami, she has thrown herself wholeheartedly into the local religion. Today she's a qualified olive oil sommelier and leads tastings at Rastrello. Her laser focus on quality means their oil, produced at her parents' home, has won five gold medals around the world.
Olives are everywhere here. In the stairwell of the hotel's new annexe sits a bowl-like sculpture made from leftover mulch. Upstairs in a bijou new spa and meditation room, guests can be massaged with Rastrello's oil (extra virgin, of course) infused with homegrown lavender.
On my first day Wassmann loaded me into her Fiat Panda to drive to her grove outside the village, where her 400-year-old trees slope down the hillside in wide rows. Driving through, the Panda was filled with the scent of wild mint and fennel growing between the trees. That explains the unmistakably sweet tang to Rastrello's oil.
Of course, Wassmann is not the only person in Umbria to be fanatical about olives. Three days around Lake Trasimeno is a full immersion in olio d'oliva culture. At Castiglione del Lago — a village cantilevered over the lake on a rocky bluff — the first shop we visited, Battilani, sold everything from bottle stoppers to chopping boards, hand-carved from olive wood (battilanisapori.com). At the skincare store Agilla, Augusta Giuliani slathered me in face and body creams made with her home-grown olives, grapes and herbs (agillanatura.it). 'I dedicate my soul to this,' she said, thrusting a spoonful of her oil — made from centuries-old leccino olive trees — at me.
There's a lot of dedicating of souls to food around Trasimeno. Everywhere I went, people seemed to have a vocation that revolved around hyper-local produce. At Cucina & Giardino the chef Nicola Fanfano whisked up salad bowls of fresh veg from Wassmann's garden with the fagiolina del Trasimeno, a nutty local black-eyed pea (mains from £11; rastrello.com).
Close by in the town square, Lorena Buttiglieri was blending the recipes of her native Sicily with those of her Panicalese husband, Simone Gallo, at their restaurant, Il Gallo nel Pozzo (mains from £16; ilgallonelpozzo.it). A Sicilian rotolo — a savoury Swiss roll of tissue-thin pasta wrapped around a ricotta and spinach filling — preceded pork medallions smothered in dolceforte, a sauce of red wine, cocoa, pine nuts and currants, invented in medieval Tuscany and then rolled out around central Italy. Thick, tart and gritty on the tongue, it tasted of pure history.
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Umbria is the only landlocked region on the Italian peninsula, yet there was local fish too. La Locanda dei Pescatori is a restaurant run by a cooperative of Trasimeno fishermen, perched on the lakefront beneath Panicale (mains from £11; locandadeipescatori.com). Beside their boats I feasted on Trasimeno's signature dish, carpa regina alla porchetta, carp seasoned and roasted just like porchetta (garlic and herb-stuffed pork, which Umbrians claim to have invented). I closed my eyes and took a bite — a melt-in-mouth, crumbly, herby steak that was so bizarrely meaty that I regretted the white wine I had ordered. Luckily that local white went down perfectly with the antipasto — a platter of nine lake-fish snacks from creamed pike to sweet-and-sour-marinated perch and tench flan.
Of course, there's culture here too. Raphael's master Perugino was born in nearby Citta della Pieve, and painted one of his masterpieces in the Chiesa di San Sebastiano on the outskirts of Panicale. From outside, it's so unassuming that I wondered if I had got the right place; then I stepped inside to find a scene of balletic violence frescoed across the back wall. A near-death St Sebastian stood nonchalantly on a pedestal while curly-haired archers in glorious scarlet, blue and green leggings positioned themselves to shoot him. Behind them arced a precisely painted landscape — hills unrolling to flat plains, water behind them — that seemed familiar. Stepping outside I looked lakewards and saw almost exactly the same view. Only now there were more olive trees (£3; terredelperugino.it).
See, Panicale may be pint-sized (and its attractions equally bijou) but it's a diamond — and not yet hit by mass tourism like Cortona, across the lake. Entry to the church costs £3.50, but for another £2 you can get a guided tour of the village's other attractions: the 18th-century theatre, the 16th-century Sant'Agostino church, where a pianist practised as I wafted in to see Panicale's collection of tulle, and the church of Santa Maria della Sbarra, with religious art in the eaves (twice daily from the tourist office; comune.panicale.pg.it). The guide left me at the swaggeringly big main church of San Michele Arcangelo. Behind the altar was a striking Annunciation — a resigned-looking Mary accepting her fate from a fierce angel. I looked closer — it was attributed to Masolino, a Panicale lad who would later make his name by ushering in the Renaissance in Florence with Masaccio. Truly, this is a town that keeps its light under a bushel. (The Perugino church even has a frescoed angel thought to be by Raphael.)
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But then, the whole area does. Next to Trasimeno, just across the Tuscan border, is Chiusi, an important city for the pre-Roman Etruscans. It's home to magical painted tombs that are closed at the moment, but its museum, the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Chiusi is stuffed with phenomenal finds (£5; museitoscana.cultura.gov.it). At La Citta Sotteranea, in a basement below a 16th-century palazzo, Etruscan tunnels have been repurposed as a museum of the dead, with thousands of gravestones, each marked with a name, plus sculptures of winged horses and banqueting Etruscans (£3; comune.chiusi.si.it).
The Etruscans were called dissolute by the Romans for two things: gender equality and the fact that they didn't dilute their wine. So it's fitting that one of the area's best vineyards, Colle Santa Mustiola, has its cellar converted from an Etruscan woman's tomb (tastings £26; poggioaichiari.it).
Fabio Cenni, the one-man-band winemaker, led me out of the June heat into the tomb (a cave sculpted from the hillside) then through the hill, following tunnels blasted to age his vino at constant, cool temperatures.
Cenni grows that great Tuscan varietal, sangiovese, but unlike other Tuscan vintners he grows nothing else, turning it instead into red and rosé, still and sparkling. The soil here used to be under the sea — in the tomb he showed me a layer of fossilised oyster shells embedded in the hillside — and the reds have a thrilling hint of salinity.
'You have to respect the territory,' he said as we swilled his rosé, Kernos, named after the vessels used at wine-fuelled Etruscan banquets. 'You respect it by producing what we always produced, not by looking for varietals that aren't ours.'
That night at Cucina & Giardino I ate a parmigiana of caramelised onions from Wassmann's garden, followed by aubergine rolls stuffed with lake perch, olive oil gelato and olive leaf tea. As the sun set over that Perugino view and swallows circled overhead, I remembered Cenni's words and thought, he's right. Here, home really is where the heart is.
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Julia Buckley was a guest of Rastrello, which has B&B doubles from £236 (rastrello.com). Fly to Perugia, Florence or Rome
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