Rocca Ubaldinesca di Sassocorvaro

The Rocca Ubaldinesca crowns the hill town of Sassocorvaro Auditore, in the Montefeltro hills of the province of Pesaro and Urbino in northern Marche. It was built around 1475 by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, the brilliant Sienese architect and military engineer who also worked on the Palazzo Ducale di Urbino, for Ottaviano Ubaldini della Carda, kinsman and counsellor of Duke Federico da Montefeltro. The fortress is one of the earliest and most distinctive examples of the new military architecture developed in response to gunpowder artillery: its rounded, sloping walls, designed to deflect cannon fire, give the building an unusual organic form often likened to a tortoise or a crouching animal, quite unlike the angular towers of earlier castles. Inside, beyond the military exterior, lie more refined spaces including a small jewel-box theatre and frescoed rooms that reflect the cultivated Montefeltro court. The Rocca owes its modern fame to a remarkable episode of the Second World War: in the early 1940s the art superintendent Pasquale Rotondi chose this remote fortress as a secret deposit, and within its walls he hid some ten thousand artworks from across Italy, including masterpieces evacuated from Venice and the Marche, to protect them from bombing and looting. This wartime art-rescue story is commemorated in the fortress today, alongside collections that may include period furnishings and reproductions illustrating the rescue. Set above its small town with views over the Montefeltro countryside, the Rocca Ubaldinesca combines a landmark of Renaissance military engineering with one of the most moving stories of cultural heroism in modern Italian history.