Trevi is one of Umbria's most striking hilltop villages — a tight cluster of medieval streets and stone buildings stacked on a conical hill above the Valle Umbra, surrounded by olive groves. On the train between Perugia and Spoleto, you can see it from the window: a perfect silhouette that most guidebooks dismiss as inaccessible and pass over. They are partly right about the access, but wrong to skip it.
Getting up the hill without a car requires some effort. Buses run infrequently and are timed for local schoolchildren rather than visitors; taxis come from Foligno and are not cheap. The walk down with luggage is steep enough to give fit travellers pause. But those who make it find a village that has not yet been overrun — peaceful streets, real residents going about their days, and the kind of quiet that the more famous Umbrian towns have largely lost.
The medieval centre rewards wandering. The San Francesco Church and Complesso Museale is worth catching if a concert is playing — the acoustics in the nave are extraordinary, the result of ceramic resonators built into the walls. The Museo della Civiltà dell'Olivo reflects Trevi's centuries-old identity as an olive oil town; the surrounding groves are among the oldest cultivated landscapes in Umbria. At the summit, the Cattedrale di Sant'Emiliano commands views down both sides of the hill.
Below the town, two excursions are worth the descent. The Tempietto del Clitunno — a bafflingly well-preserved early Christian chapel that looks like a Roman temple — stands beside a spring that Virgil and Byron both wrote about. And the Romanesque abbey of San Pietro in Bovara, in the hamlet at the foot of the hill, is one of the finest and least-visited Romanesque buildings in Umbria.