Urbino Culture

Urbino is two things at once: a monument and a student town, and the second keeps the first alive.

Students

The university, founded in 1506, brings something like fifteen thousand students to a town of fourteen thousand residents. In term the bars are loud and the streets are busy until late; in August the place empties and feels twice its size. Anyone who visits in the two halves of the year sees two different towns.

The court idea

Castiglione's Cortegiano was set here, and the town knows it. The notion of sprezzatura — doing difficult things with apparent ease — was formulated in these rooms and is still the local self-image, worn lightly and with some irony.

Raphael

He left at seventeen and never really came back, and Urbino claims him anyway. His father Giovanni Santi was the court painter and the house where both worked is open.

The book school

Urbino has taught engraving, typography and illustration since the nineteenth century, and the school that does it is a national institution: generations of Italian illustrators and printmakers trained here, and the workshops in the town still sell what comes off their presses. Book and paper conservation is taught here too, which is not a coincidence in a town that once held one of Europe's great libraries.

Kites

On the first Sunday of September the town's districts compete in a kite festival on the hill below the fortress, which has been running for well over a century and is genuinely a local event.

Food

Crescia sfogliata, a layered flatbread cooked on a griddle and filled with ham and cheese, is the thing to eat; the local cheese, casciotta d'Urbino, carries a protected designation.