Fonti del Clitunno

The Fonti del Clitunno are a celebrated group of natural springs near Campello sul Clitunno, in the Valle Umbra between Spoleto and Foligno, where water wells up from the ground to form a series of glassy, mirror-still pools fringed by weeping willows, poplars and reeds. The setting is small but enchanting: paths wind between the limpid channels and islets, ducks and swans glide across water so clear that the green weeds and pebbles on the bottom are perfectly visible, and the whole place has the quality of a painting. The springs have been admired since antiquity; in Roman times the valley was lined with villas and the waters were held sacred, with an oracle nearby, and they were praised by Virgil and the younger Pliny, who described the clear pool and its little temple. Centuries later the Romantic imagination rediscovered them, and both Byron, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the Italian poet Giosue Carducci, in a famous ode, immortalised the spot. Today the Fonti are an enclosed park entered for a small fee, and a visit is short and gentle, usually thirty to forty-five minutes strolling the shaded paths and pausing at the viewpoints over the water. The springs are loveliest in the soft light of early morning, when the surface is mirror-calm and the crowds thin. The park lies just off the old Via Flaminia and is an easy stop by car, naturally combined with the early-medieval Tempietto del Clitunno a short distance up the road, in central Umbria.