Templars in Perugia

Jakob posing dramatically inside the church

A few weeks back we thought we had spotted a Templar lodge, but we had got the wrong church military order. How interesting it was to discover that the only extant Templar church in Italy is right on the outskirts of Perugia (here’s a list of Templar sites).

The Church of San Bevignate is located on a windy road, Via Enrico dal Pozzo (‘Henry from the Well’) that extends northeast from the city, nearly to the civic cemetery of the town. The site of the Templar Church is not marked anywhere in Google Maps (which must be a conspiracy, of course), so I’m providing a map below (the church is marked by the red thumbtack), in case anyone wants to visit. You don’t have to wear a sinister cloak  when you visit, either. In fact, if you leave a form of ID at the desk, they’ll give you a tablet which has an audio tour of the complex (in multiple languages, including English). They also have quite the little Templar book display, though everything is in Italian.

Of course, Jakob loved it, and he spent a good amount of time exploring, or posing theatrically as an ‘Assassin’.

San Bevignate is marked by the red thumbtack.

Templars and Assassins

Trotting the rooftops of Lecce

I love Assassin’s Creed. I love parkour.  Parkour is running and jumping and flipping in an orderly fashion over objects, and cities are good for that. Italian cities are really good for that sort of thing because the buildings are close together.

I sort of love history. In Assassin’s Creed, the ‘Assassins’ fight the ‘Templars‘. In the game, the Templars are trying to take over the world in order to have ‘peace’. So it was interesting when we went to Lecce and thought we saw an actual Templar lodge.