Currently, Umbria includes the provinces of Perugia (the main city) and Terni. It has a surface area of nearly 8500 sq km, a population of about 800,000 inhabitants and it is a particularly green landscape but has no sea ports.

In ancient times it was inhabited by the Etruscans and Umbrans. At the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. (the battle of Sentino in 295 B.C.), Rome took control of the territory and the two populations, whose civilizations soon disappeared. From that time on, Umbria remained under Roman control.

As with the rest of the peninsula, the progressive decline of the Western Roman Empire was accompanied, and in part caused by, barbaric invasions which from the 5th century A.D. occurred one after another, leading to destruction and dismemberment. Among the invading peoples, we can recall the Visigoths, Eruli, Unni and Vandals; while the invasions by the Ostrogoths (493-526 A.D.) and the Longobards (who moved down into Italy in 568) were in various ways different in that they established reigns of greater stability. It was above all the Longobards who, after a brief parenthesis of Byzantine dominion, skilfully created more solid political, economic and cultural structures. In Umbria, the duchy of Spoleto gained strength in this period.

The large and important Umbrian centres developed in the communal period and it was Perugia that gained the upper hand, which it maintained also during the signorie period, until the Papal States took control in the mid-16th century. From that time on, the luck of the region followed that of the Church State (except for a brief Napoleonic period).

During the Italian ‘Risorgimento’, Umbria participated first in insurrectionary movements in 1830-31, and then in those of 1848. In 1859 the Perugia movements were brutally repressed but the following year the Region, by way of a plebiscite, was annexed to the rising kingdom of Italy under the crown of Vittorio Emanuele II.