The Haunting Heart of Perugia
Date
April 26, 2026
Perugia won’t tell you about its ghosts. You can’t hear them over the lively chatter from a café. Instead, this ancient city wears its hauntings on every building, street sign, and ground stone. To visit Perugia is to walk through layers of time, where the line keeping past and present separate is thrillingly thin. Although the city is built on a hill, its foundation isn’t made up of rock, but the city’s history itself. The Etruscan Arch still stands guard. As you pass under its dark, slanted stones, you walk the same path as a civilization shrouded in history. The modern world vanishes. The air feels cold and damp, with the scent of wet earth and ancient stone. The sheer weight of the place is enough to make you feel the desperation it took to carve this lifeline into the mountain. It was a feeling I had never experienced before.
Eventually, you leave, taking the escalators back up to the modern world. But you still feel slightly out of place. You will still catch yourself listening for echoes that aren’t there or get a shiver in a room filled with warmth, bringing a piece of the cold and quiet home with you. Later, as the sun began to dip into the hills, new feelings arose. The sun-colored stones of the buildings had now cooled into a muted grey. With every arch I walked under and hill I climbed, I had become more aware of the ghostly presence, which had remained here for hundreds of years before me. This is Perugia’s true haunt. You don’t have to know the dates or names in order to experience the undeniable sensation that you are a guest in a space that remembers everything. It’s a collective imprint of all the lives that have lived within these walls.
These pieces were created by student contributors. The views and opinions expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Arcadia Abroad.