Day 21 (4/25) Sunny Urbino

Today we visited Urbino. The drive from Sigillo took about an hour-- north mostly on via Flaminia. Urbino is an interesting city. It’s greatest prominence was during Renaissance when artists such as a Raphael, Piero della Francesca and many others lived and worked there. Then it flourished again at the beginning of the 18th century when many civil and religious buildings were built by wealthy aristocratic families. The historical center of the city is spectacular and it is a UNESCO heritage site. In the brochures it is also called “world capital of utopia”. When we got there, a band was playing in one of the main piazzas and hundreds of young people were gathered there. The place was jumping. It turned out that today is a holiday, an anniversary of liberation from fascism and hence the celebrations. We walked around stepping into many historical buildings – Palazzo Ducale, the cathedral and a bunch of other churches, Raphael’s house, and a very interesting small Museum della Citta. There is a big university in this small town of about 15,000 so you see mostly young people in the streets and many of the historical buildings belong to the university. When we got hungry, we decided to have pizza for lunch. To our great surprise, the restaurants were overflowing and it was hard to get a table. Even more surprising was the fact that they all said that they didn’t serve pizza for lunch, only in the evening. Finally we came across a pizzeria which was packed with students eating great looking pizzas. We ordered a pizza gigante for all four of us. It was huge but we managed to gobble it all up. To burn the calories, we walked to the monastery of Santa Chiara. Then Lucy and Bo continued on to the highest point in town Fortezza Albornoz with a beautiful view down on the old town while Al and Reni had coffee in the piazza.