Overview
The salt trade, a dear and precious product until the industrial age, is at the centre of the events that led to the construction of the Rocca Paolina, a cyclopean defensive fortress at the southern end of Perugia's historic centre.
In 1540, in an attempt to enrich the coffers of the Church to finance the religious wars in the Holy Land, the then Pope Paul III tried to impose a much higher payment on the government of Perugia for the purchase of salt than had been agreed upon up to that time.
Irritated by this exorbitant demand, the Perugians, who had no way of procuring their own salt, rebelled against the papal decision and started a series of violent clashes against a military force, that of Paul III, which was much larger and more organised than theirs.
As predicted, the papal army occupied Perugia after a few months and the pope decided to assert his new role of dominion over the city by building the Rocca Paolina, which remained unused in the following centuries: Perugia was in fact never attacked, remaining permanently under Vatican control until 1860.
After careful restoration and recovery work, the Rocca Paolina now welcomes visitors along a fascinating walkway, which traverses the underground of the Umbrian capital with escalators and underground tunnels. One is in the heart of the 'buried city', and along the underground Via Bagliona one walks among streets and small squares, courtyards and fondachi, overlooked by the windows of ancient dwellings or bakeries and workshops. But along the tour, at the top of the escalators and in the midst of the 'past', in the Salone delle Acque, does not go unnoticed by Il Grande Nero created by Burri in 1980, an imposing 7.5 metre high kinetic sculpture in the shape of an irregular prism: on its top you can see a sort of lunette that, thanks to an internal mechanism, moves in a slow, silent and constant manner.
