Monteluco by climbing the enchanting road built during the First World War by Austrian prisoners of war. This road carries on from the first part which led to the track joining up with the "Giro del Ponte" (the walking path over the Bridge) created at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The road overlooks the eastern part of the city and is convered by a thick wood of centuries-old holm-oaks considered sacred even back in Roman times (lucus = sacred wood). These oaks are still as green as ever despite periods of negligence and uncontrolled exploitation. Monteluco was a place of pagan cult worship in ancient times. It continued in this tradition throughout the Middle Ages becoming a second Thebaid full of solitary hermitages. Today people still go there to get away from it all. Hermitical life began there with Saint Isaac in the fifth century and was continued by the Benedictine monks depending on Saint Julian. After moving away from their Benedictine abbey, the hermits of Monteluco formed an autonomous congregation concentrating around the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. It had its own Rule. The hermitages became in time small convents and forbade entrance for centuries to non members. After the Restauration it was still forbidden for women to climb the mountain except on three days of the year. From the sixteenth century on the hermitages were open to lay men as temporary spiritual retreats. Even Michelangelo stayed here visiting the monks in 1556. At the end of the Eighteenth century the government of the Roman Republic expelled the congregation from Monteluco and took over the hermitages. Some of these hermitages are now magnificent villas.

Other than the Hermitage of St. Francis, within the "sacred wood" at the top of the mountain there are still some grottos owhere many saints once prayed.

In the wood there is also an inscribed pillar which is a copy of the original stone bearing the Lex Spoletina (Law of Spoleto). It dates back to the third century BC and was meant to safeguard the wood. The original is preserved in the National Archeological Museum. The Law itself is written in arcaic Latin but on the pedestal underneath there is a translation.

There is also a small cemetery clinging to the side of the mountain just outside the sacred wood. It can be entered from the right side of the square where a wonderful panoramic view of incomparable beauty and suggestion can be admired.