How Was Urbino Built

Urbino has two great building campaigns, five hundred years apart, and both were driven by an idea rather than by need.

Brick

There is no building stone in these hills, so the town is brick: warm red, laid in long steep runs, with dressed stone reserved for doorways, windows and the palace itself. That single material is most of why the centre reads as one thing.

The palace

Begun in the 1450s, the Palazzo Ducale was directed first by Luciano Laurana and then by Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Its trick is topography: on the valley side it presents the famous facade between two slim towers, five storeys tall; from the square behind it is a low, sober front. Inside, the courtyard is the clearest statement of Renaissance proportion anywhere in Italy.

The studiolo

Federico's small study is lined with wooden intarsia depicting shelves, instruments and half-open cupboards in perspective — an entire room made as an argument about how seeing works.

Service below

Beneath the state rooms run stables, ice houses, baths and a system for collecting rainwater, all visitable, and all evidence that the building was engineered as well as designed.

Valadier's cathedral

The Duomo collapsed after an earthquake in 1789 and was rebuilt neoclassically by Giuseppe Valadier, which is why it looks nothing like the town around it.

De Carlo

From the late 1950s Giancarlo De Carlo built the university's colleges on the opposite hill in brick and concrete, stepping them down the slope rather than levelling it. They are among the most admired postwar buildings in Italy and are almost unvisited.