Sunday 25 June 2023
Okay, I have to admit that I’ve fallen in love with Urbino. It is clearly (and undeservedly) off the tourist trail for most visitors to Italy, but it has met my expectations and more.
My expectations were set when we listened to a course on Renaissance history and learned about Frederico di Montefeltro, a 15th century mercenary captain who was awesome at war, and also incredibly honourable, and so became insanely rich and used his money to create an enlightened and romantic Renaissance court based in his immense ducal palace in the otherwise small, out of the way, provincial mountain town of Urbino in the Marche. He had a broken nose and was missing an eye but he sponsored art and artists on the scale of the much bigger city-states and the painter Raphael was born here. This gem burned bright and brief, for his son was also a lovely and romantic guy but with none of the grit and savvy of his father he got totally taken advantage of.
Anyway, we explored Urbino thoroughly today. The town is built on a couple of big hills, so there’s plenty of steep climbs and oodles of lovely views. Some of the prettiest bits are in the old town set in the little valley between the two hills.
At Urbino’s heart is the ducal palace, where we spent more than three hours exploring the duke’s grand chambers and the big collection of Marche art housed there now. The best painting is the portrait of Duke Frederico (complete with broken nose) reading a big book to his little son. One of the most stunning elements of the palace, better than all the paintings, are the original marquetry doors between all the rooms, and one complete chamber decorated wall-to-wall with the most clever and skilful marquetry complete with accomplished 3D illusions. And all of it from the 16th century. Below the palace there’s also a warren of cellar rooms to explore, including some huge storage cellars and enormous underground stables.
Anyway, one entire day is just about enough to thoroughly explore Urbino. It feels like a lovely town. We stopped for bits of lunch and snacks to keep us going. In the evening the town square was again really good for people watching with gelato. For dinner we picked a modern winebar that had only just opened (no reviews online and not even shown on Google Maps!) and enjoyed some really good glasses of Marche red wine and a big crisp bread topped with porchetta.
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