Assisi/Ancona advice

Due to a scheduling error on my part, my wife and I will be spending 3 days and 2 nights in Assisi this summer. From everything I've read, Assisi is worth no more than a day unless you're a religious scholar (which neither of us is). In the hopes of fixing my mistake, I have 3 questions for the forum:

1. Have I been misinformed about Assisi? Can we keep ourselves entertained there for the duration of our stay?
2. Can you recommend any day trips from Assisi (apart from Perugia which is where we'll be coming from)?
3. From Assisi, we will be going to Ancona to catch an 11PM ferry to Croatia. Our plan had been to take a late train arriving in Ancona just in time for the ferry. Is Ancona worth a whole day? If so, it will at least cut out one of our currently boring seeming Assisi days.

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide.

As regards day-trips from Assisi, I would suggest Spello ( a lovely Roman town ) or Gubbio or Lake Trasimeno / Cortona. There is certainly enough to keep you occupied there! Assisi is a magical place, the frescoes at the Basilica will take your breath away, but the town itself can be crowded and commercial.

I would recommend Spello as well. Other places: Trevi, Spoleto, Todi. Umbria is wonderful, you'll easily fill up your time.

This website may be helpful.

If you're coming from Perugia, why are you travelling all of 20mins to relocate to Assisi? That's a whole lot of time wasted packing up, checking out, changing accommodation, checking in again etc.

If you don't want to spend lots of time in Assisi, why not visit there as a daytrip from Perugia? In fact, use Perugia as a base for a few extra days. Perugia is a much livelier, larger centre where you could easily occupy yourselves for a few days. Do a google search for my travel notes called Perusing Perugia.

Saint_Bambi: Thanks for the advice, but as I said, it was a screw up on my part, and the hotels are already booked. I'll be kicking myself for some time over this, but it sounds like at the very least, thanks to all the advice, we won't be stuck with nothing to do. Thanks a lot everyone!

Two nights in Assisi doesn't sound like a problem to me. It's an amazingly beautiful town. Apart from the main churches like the S. Francesco basilica and S. Maria degli Angeli (down by the railway station), I would spend some time in the beautiful hilltop castle (with a torture museum) and maybe also take a hike. There are plenty of trails - there's even one that will take you all the way to Gubbio, which by the way is a beautiful town well worth a visit.

A route from Assisi to Ancona could be a bus to Gubbio, where you spend a few hours before heading by bus to Fossato di Vico (Gubbio's railway station) and train from there to Ancona. Ancona didn't strike me as a very interesting place, but there are nice beaches nearby. If I had some hours to spend in the area, I might instead head to Loreto, a nice old town, most famous because of the holy family's house, which the Crusaders apparently brought back from Nazareth.