Urbino Discovery Guide
Why Visit Urbino the Smart Way
Urbino is a hill town of about fourteen thousand people in the Marche, and for roughly forty years in the fifteenth century it held the best-funded intellectual court in Europe. The palace that court was run from is still standing, and most of the paintings made for it are still inside it.
The friction is getting there. Urbino has no railway. Everyone arrives by bus or by car up a winding road, and once you are in, the town is steep in every direction.
That effort is the filter. What is at the top is a Renaissance palace by Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio, Piero della Francesca's Flagellation, the room where Raphael was born, and a working university that keeps the place from being a museum. Pair it with the Oratorio di San Giovanni and, on the opposite hill, Giancarlo De Carlo's student colleges — the best modern architecture in Italy that almost nobody goes to see.
How to Experience Urbino
The palace first, at opening
Go before the coaches from the coast arrive, and start in the courtyard rather than the galleries.
Sit in the studiolo
It is small and people pass through it in a minute. Give it fifteen and look at what the inlay is doing with perspective.
Walk up to the fortress
Free, and the view of the torricini from its park is the reason everyone else is photographing from there.
The Oratorio di San Giovanni
Ten minutes downhill, two euros, and one complete room of 1416 frescoes with nobody in it.
Cross to De Carlo's colleges
Twenty minutes on foot to the facing hill, for buildings that answer the palace across the valley.
Eat a crescia standing up
From a griddle counter on Via Raffaello, which is what the students do between lectures.
Where to Find Authentic Cultural and Historical Character
Urbino has the confidence of a place that was once the centre of something and has not had to prove it since.
It is a small town that is also a university town, which produces an unusual mix: elderly residents who have watched a thousand years of students come and go, and a transient population that fills the bars and leaves in July. The relationship is long-established and mostly good-humoured.
There is genuine scholarly seriousness here. The art history institute, the printmaking school and the book restoration tradition are not decorative, and the town takes its own heritage with an attention that can look severe.
Visitors are welcome and are not the economy. A large share arrive from the Adriatic beaches for the afternoon, see the palace, and leave; the town is polite about it and unbothered.
The Marche as a whole are unshowy and slightly reticent by Italian standards, and Urbino is the intellectual version of that. Nobody will sell you anything hard.
The 2016 earthquakes further south left the town itself largely untouched but are a live memory across the region.
Travel Profile
- Best Known For Federico da Montefeltro's Palazzo Ducale, the model Renaissance court • Piero della Francesca's Flagellation of Christ • Raphael was born here in 1483 • Giancarlo De Carlo's university colleges on the facing hill
- Travel Styles Cultural tourism • History • Museums and galleries • Architecture • Off the beaten path • Slow travel • Food and drink
- Travel Environments Historic cities • Countryside • Rivers
- Getting Around No railway at all -- the Fano-Urbino line is disused -- so the practical arrival is the bus from Pesaro, about an hour, connecting with trains on the Adriatic coastal line, or a car up a winding road from the A14 at Pesaro or Fano in about forty minutes; parking is outside the gates at Borgo Mercatale with lifts up into the centre, the walled town is pedestrian and relentlessly steep, and a car is useful only for the Montefeltro villages
Responsible Travel Tips
Urbino's pressure is concentrated: one building, a few hours a day, in high summer.
Stay the night. Most visitors come from the Adriatic resorts for an afternoon and leave; a town with very few beds benefits far more from the ones that get used.
Come outside July and August if you can. The palace is calmer and the town is alive rather than emptied.
Spend beyond the palace: the Oratorio, the diocesan museum, the print workshops and the smaller churches all need the admissions they get.
The centre is a UNESCO site people live in. The streets are residential above shop level, and voices carry upward at night in a way that is easy to forget.
Buy the local things — casciotta, the printmaking school's work, books — rather than imported souvenirs.
In the Montefeltro, keep to tracks; the clay slopes erode easily and the calanchi are unstable.
When to Visit Urbino
September and October are the best of the year: warm, clear, the students back, and the kite festival on the first Sunday of September.
April and May are the other window, with the hills green and the town busy.
Late August brings the Festa del Duca, the costumed Renaissance festival, which is the one time the town deliberately performs its own history.
July and August otherwise are hot and oddly quiet, since the students have gone; good for the palace, thin for atmosphere.
Winter is cold and can be snowbound, but the galleries are empty and the light on brick is at its best.
Note that many museums here close on Monday, and that the Palazzo Ducale is worth arriving at when it opens rather than after lunch.
Travel Cost Levels in Urbino
What a visitor actually pays in Urbino
Urbino is cheaper than its status suggests, because a student town cannot charge tourist prices for lunch and because day visitors from the coast do not stay. The squeeze is on rooms rather than on food: the walled centre has very few beds, and they go early for the Festa del Duca in August, the kite festival in September, and university graduation weeks.