Urbino historical timeline

Urbino's importance rests almost entirely on one lifetime, and the town has lived on the consequences ever since.

Before the Montefeltro

Roman Urvinum Mataurense was a modest hill settlement. The Montefeltro family took control in the thirteenth century and spent two hundred years fighting their neighbours without ever being rich.

Federico

Federico da Montefeltro became lord in 1444 and duke in 1474. He was a condottiero, a mercenary general who hired himself out to Milan, Naples, Florence and the papacy, and he spent the proceeds here. He lost his right eye and part of his nose in a tournament, which is why every portrait shows him in profile from the left.

The court

He built the palace, assembled one of the largest libraries in Europe, and employed Piero della Francesca, Joos van Wassenhove and Pedro Berruguete. Baldassarre Castiglione set The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, at this court under Federico's son Guidobaldo; through it the manners of these rooms reached the whole of Europe.

Decline

The duchy passed to the Della Rovere and in 1631 was absorbed into the Papal States. The library went to the Vatican, the court dispersed, and Urbino became a provincial town with an extraordinary building in it.

The art of the war years

In 1939 Pasquale Rotondi, the superintendent of fine arts for the Marche and based in Urbino, was given the task of hiding the movable art of half of Italy. Several thousand works, including paintings from the Venetian collections, were concealed in the castle at Sassocorvaro and at Carpegna and came through the war intact.

The university

Founded in 1506, it was the town's continuity through three quiet centuries and is now the reason Urbino is populated rather than preserved.