AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Arco dei Tei is one of Perugia's old city gates: a tall pointed arch built of honey-coloured sandstone, set into a surviving stretch of the medieval wall at the end of Via Pinturicchio. Locals more often call it Porta Pesa, the "weighing gate," after the toll barrier and great weighbridge that once stood in front of it to tax goods entering the city. It is a small, open-air monument rather than a site with tickets or guided tours, but it makes a satisfying stop for anyone curious about how a hill town grew, defended itself and took its money.↗↗↗
Dating to roughly the 12th–13th century, the arch belongs to a first ring of walls that stood outside the older Etruscan perimeter, and together with the Arco di Santa Elisabetta it is one of the few readable traces of that early expansion. Always visible and free to approach, it asks little of a visitor's schedule and rewards a slow look at its weathered stone.↗↗
A gate from Perugia's first wall
Step up to the arch and its shape is the first thing that strikes you: a narrow, soaring Gothic opening, or sesto acuto, cut from arenaria sandstone and wedged into a remnant of the medieval ramparts. It was raised in around the 12th–13th century, when Perugia had outgrown the old Etruscan circuit of walls and needed a new, wider ring to enclose the suburbs spilling down the hillside. This early outer wall is the same system that includes the Arco di Santa Elisabetta on the other side of town, and the Arco dei Tei is one of the places where that lost boundary is still easy to picture.
