Palazzo Ducale di Urbino

The Palazzo Ducale di Urbino, on Piazza Rinascimento in the hilltop city of Urbino in the Marche region of central Italy, is one of the supreme architectural achievements of the Italian Renaissance, built largely from 1454 for Federico da Montefeltro, the soldier-scholar who made Urbino a model princely court. Federico, lord of Urbino from 1444 and Duke from 1474, gathered architects, painters and humanists around him, and the palace took shape under the Dalmatian architect Luciano Laurana and later Francesco di Giorgio Martini, who gave the western front its famous facciata dei Torricini, a soaring loggia flanked by two thin circular towers that became the symbol of the city. Inside, the palace is arranged around a serene arcaded courtyard of pale stone, considered a textbook of Renaissance proportion, from which grand staircases lead to a sequence of ceremonial halls. The most celebrated room is Federico's Studiolo, a tiny private study lined with astonishing wood intarsia panels that create illusions of shelves, instruments, books and half-open cupboards. Since 1912 the palace has housed the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, whose collection includes Piero della Francesca's Flagellation of Christ and Madonna of Senigallia, Raphael's portrait of a gentlewoman known as La Muta, and Paolo Uccello's predella of the Profanation of the Host. The whole hill town of Urbino, with the palace at its heart, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998 as an exceptionally complete Renaissance city. Birthplace of Raphael, Urbino preserves in its ducal palace both the ambition of a Renaissance prince and one of Italy's great picture galleries.