Urbino’s chief “sight,” though it is not beautiful in itself, is the birthplace of Raphael, situated in a little street running off from near the ducal palace, a street which mounts heavenward so steeply that it was formerly called the Via del Monte. The authorities, in an effort to keep up with popular taste, have recently changed the name to Via Raffaello.
It is a mean, simple and grim looking little house, not at all beautiful according to palatial standards. On the 6th of April, 1483, its fame began, but pilgrims have only in recent years come to bow down before it. Nevertheless popes and prelates and princes came here to sit to the “painter of Urbino” and have left an added distinction to the house. Muzio Oddi, the celebrated architect and mathematician, caused to be graven the following on its façade:—
“Ludet in humanis divina potentia rebus
Et saepe in parvis claudre magna solet.”
A tablet marks the house plainly. It will not be possible to miss it.
Urbino sits high above the surrounding valley, twelve or fifteen hundred feet above sea level. A coach of doubtful antiquity formerly made the same journey as that covered by the railway and deposited its mixed freight of travellers and inhabitants in one of the most splendid of the Renaissance cities of Italy. Now, the automobile brings many more tourists than ever before came by coach, or railway even, and accordingly Urbino will undoubtedly become better known.
The court of Urbino in the sixteenth century was one of the most refined and learned of the courts of Italy, and therefore of the world. Coryat in his “Crudities,” of the seventeenth century, remarks a difference between English and Italian manners.
“I observed a custom in all those Italian cities and towns through which I passed, that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels; neither do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, but only Italy. The Italian, and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, do always at their meals use a little fork when they cut their meat.” Is it that the fork came to earth as a seventeenth century Italian innovation?
Urbino’s Albergo Italia merits the sign of the crossed knife and fork, the Automobile Club’s endorsement of good food.
One of the classic figures of mediæval Urbino was Oddantonio, of the great house of Montefeltro, who, succeeding to the dukedom at the age of fifteen, fell under the ill control of the brilliant, but corrupt, Sigismondo Malatesta, of Rimini.
Thirty five kilometres east of Urbino lies the blue Adriatic, perhaps the most beautiful of all the Italian seas. The descent from four hundred metres at Urbino to sea level is gradual and easy, but it is a steady fall that is bound to be remarked by travellers by road, with the sea in sight for the major part of the way.