This essay examines how civic and aristocratic flags could embody such notions as identity, authority, honor, and shame in late medieval and renaissance Italy. It looks at legal measures for handling and displaying the civic flag; ritual contexts from executions, award ceremonies, to military triumphant parades; and materiality to explain the fascination exerted by flags as exponents of secular heraldry. Textual evidence (chronicles, city statutes, official records) brings Perugia (central Italy) to the fore as a middling-size city representative of the communal (i.e. guild-based or republican) regimes of Italy in the thirteenth–sixteenth centuries. Images that evoke vexillological [from Latin vexillum, flag] uses are critically assessed to decipher artistic conventions.