Giro d’Italia

Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1593: Giro d’Italia
Source: Herneweb.com. Cycling Blog & Photos

We arrived to Urbino on the same day as the 91th run of the Giro d’Italia. We saw the last competitors rolling out of the town. It goes without saying that we have missed its best. Whoever is curious of it can read a running commentary in the blog of Ashley and Jason. They write there was a monumental festa in the town. We, as true historians of art, can only deduce the importance of the feast from the decorations.

Places in Urbino

Urbino, Bar Victoria at the town gate Santa Lucia (end of via Bramante). Photo by Sára Nagy.

To me the crown of the visit of a city is when I find a homely place where to sit down for a while. It does not have to be a restaurant: it can be a bench, a fountain or some stairs, where I can stay in peace for a while, assimilating the impression of the city. This place will be my home in that city while I am there, and ever since in my memories.

It does not have to be a restaurant, but it is a majestic feeling when I succeed in finding a restaurant which is suitable for becoming such a home. A restaurant which, with its natural and personal atmosphere, simple furnishings, the objects piling up above the counter and on the walls, and the informal manners of the waiter from the beginning suggests this homeliness and timelessness. A place that is visited by the people in the neighborhood both for the sake of the kitchen and of the company.

I’m no gourmand, so when I manage to find such a place, I’m not anxious about the quality of its kitchen. In a really authentic place the chef cannot be bad either, especially if local people really go there. Now, however, as we visited Urbino in a company of gourmands, I made all efforts to find something that would please them from this point of view as well.

When we were in Urbino a year and half ago, we were looking for such a place at dinner time, but in vain. Finally in the wine-house at the end of via Raffaello they gave us some tips, adding with resignation that “anyway, there is no free table there at this time”. Finally there was one in the cellar of L’Angolo Divino, and it was not bad either, but I thought that for the next occasion it would be better to become proficient well in advance in the restaurants of the town.

The category just described is called in Italy osteria (inn), trattoria (hash-house) or taverna (pub). Unfortunately the orientation is made more difficult by the fact that recently many fashionable restaurants too adopted these names to evoke a traditional feeling, just like modern csárda’s do in Hungary. Nevertheless this is a good starting point. I have therefore composed from the web a list of restaurants in Urbino, putting on the first place those bearing the above names, and then I have searched for their mentions on the main blog servers. I supposed that tourists reporting on their impressions would also mention the restaurants they found sympathetic. I especially counted on the opinions of those coming round from other Italian cities who would know local standards better than foreigners. And I was not disappointed indeed. Various blog authors in various languages recommended the following places entro le mura of Urbino (moving the mouse over their names you can read some short info on them):

Naturally in and immediately around the town there are a lot more – about forty – restaurants, and it is not certain that some of them are not better than these eight ones. These only differ from the rest in that they possess “web references”, while the others do not, so if you have only a few time for experimenting – like we did now – then it is safer to try these.

If our benevolent Readers have good experiences with any other restaurant, we would gladly insert them too on the map.

Urbino, Taverna degli Artisti, via Bramante 52. Photo by Sára Nagy.

From these eight we have chosen this time the Taverna degli Artisti. This place can be found towards the end of via Bramante, almost at the town gate, far from any shop or restaurant, and its trade-sign is only a little lamp above the door and a modest board in the shop-window. Without the above preliminary studies we would have certainly not entered here. Enlightened, however, we also knew that we would have to necessarily book a table, if there will be any free table here at all by the time we arrive to Urbino.

And there was one. True, only at ten and a half, one single table. The two half-cellars – as you have to descend on scales from the street, but the room has windows on the other side through which you can look down on the town – were filled up by students, perhaps from the faculty of fine arts, of great importance in Urbino, that might also explain the name of the place. Another explanation is granted by the 18th-century frescoes decorating all the premises of the restaurant. These, if you have a closer look at them, have been just recently made, in original style. They were most probably painted by the students of the faculty, perhaps consuming in the evening what they worked for during the daytime.

If it happened really so, then it was a splendid deal for them. In fact, the kitchen of the Taverna degli Artisti is so fantastic that it surpasses every other Italian restaurant known to me. I have been visiting Italy for more than twenty years as a student, an interpreter, a researcher and for seeing my friends, but I have never tasted so refined dishes that I can compare only with those of the subtlest Chinese restaurants in China. We have asked for fresh mushroom salad, chitarrine (a typical pasta of Marche), ravioli with walnut and mushroom, buffalo-milk mozzarella that, in contrast to the one you can buy in the shops, melted in the mouth like sponge cake, and a majestic roasted lamb’s cutlet – but I think any other composition of this kitchen would have fascinated us as well. The wine of the house was an especially fine, light one from Marche in bottles of one liter, a real refreshment after the heavy Tuscan wines. We have ordered twice of it, and we have also asked for a dessert, but even so we have paid less than 18 euros per head at the end of the dinner.

And then there are yet seven – or, if we disregard the already tested and approved Angolo Divino, then six – warranted places left for the next visits. I do not know whether they will be able to surpass the Artisti, but one thing is sure, that we will find much pleasure in testing them.


Update. We have just discovered that four days ago Ashley and Jason, owners of the nearby agriturismo La Tavola Marche – and friends of Giulia mentioned in our previous post – also were in Urbino, also had a dinner in the Artisti, and they confirm our suspicion that the frescoes were in fact painted by art students. – It is interesting – and comforting – to see that the last photo of their post shows unharmed that inscription on the town’s statue of Raffaello which we had seen broken three days earlier together with the right hand of the putto holding it.

Urbino

Urbino seen from the north-west. Source: Home in Rome. Absolutely click on the image!

Urbino really emerges so unexpectedly, without any transition on the mountain-top among the green hills, like the medieval castles in the book of hours of the Duke of Berry. Other medieval Italian towns are encircled by large zones of modern suburbs, but Urbino was tailored so disproportionately large by the 15th-century building activity of the Duke Federigo da Montefeltro like the coat of a newborn puppy, so that the town has not yet managed to entirely fill it up. True, in the course of the last century a modern university quarter has been established to the north of the walls, but it completely disappears between the green hills, only the students fill with vitality the city in the twenty-four hours of the day.


However, the main view of the town is from the south-west, as it appears for the first time to the traveler coming from Florence or Rome. The impressive twin towers with the three-storied loggia between them look as if this were a colossal main gate of the city, monumentally increasing the proportions of the town and of the palace. This, however, is a well calculated architectural trick. In the reality the towers flank the back-windows of the palace, whose main entrance opens on the other side, towards the main square. Urbino keeps up the appearance outside, but inside it lives its own life.


This fascinating town is in fact surprisingly small. You can walk through it from the north to the south in ten minutes – true, in the other direction you need at least twice as much time because of the enormous difference in level. Nevertheless, the visitor feels it spacious and large, for it is rich, refined and vivid, and it has everything that is necessary to perfection: good restaurants, cafés and enotecas, that is wine-shops visited by the locals, museums and palaces, churches and oratories with religious companies active since the Middle Ages, good bookshops, university clubs, art workshops, Bible reading circles, associations of mushroom gatherers and alpinists, botanical gardens and many green spots. It is like a small-scale model for every other Italian town, an ideal city as it has been regarded since the Renaissance, and as it was represented in the idealized image by Piero della Francesca in the gallery of the Palazzo Ducale, one of the most distinguished galleries of modern Italy.

Photo of Bill Storage

The most illustrious monument of the town is naturally the Palazzo Ducale founded by Duke Federigo in the second part of the 1400s and built by several outstanding masters who all had learnt their craft in Florence. Due to their excellence and their mastery of the new architectural language shaped by Brunelleschi, the palace is not only the very first Renaissance building created outside of Florence, but also the most beautiful Renaissance palace in absolute. Our friend Péter Farbaky, one of the best researchers of Quattrocento art in Hungary has pointed out that this edifice inspired several important details of the – since then vanished – late 15th-century palace of King Matthias in Buda, from the marvelous ground-floor arcades through the studiolo to the hanging garden looking at the hills – of Marche and Buda, respectively – and visually merging with them.


The bookshop in the native house of Raffaello is the richest source of the literature on the local history of Urbino. The great amount of these publications demonstrates both the self-consciousness of the town and the vigor of the local workshop of urban history. A remarkable part of these works are signed or introduced by the critic, historian of French literature, senator and university rector Carlo Bo (1911-2001), whose name has been adopted by the university of Urbino. From the abundant selection we have purchased the monograph of Urbino by Franco Mazzini, the catalog of local houses and palaces by Franco Negroni, the photo album by Pepi Merisio with the descriptions of Carlo Bo and Ermete Grifoni, and the 18th-century description of Urbino by two cardinals of Clement XI who was a member of the local Albani family. We will also present them later here, on our blog.

A great part of the only English book on Urbino written by June Osborne and illustrated with beautiful photos can be read in the library of Google. But, strangely, we cannot find much more on the web about Urbino. In Italian only some summary lists of monuments, while in other languages not even that much. But the web only reflects what we have also seen in the reality while traveling in Marche: that this province has not yet been discovered by tourism, unlike its counterpart on the other side of the mountains, Tuscany. Interestingly, only some American journals and blogs publish some competent descriptions about the town and its surroundings, by Christopher Solomon in the Times, by David VanderVelde from Kansas, by Anne & Kirk Woodyard from Washington, or in the Sunday supplement of the Independent. The author of this latter article, who meticulously describes hour by hour his day spent here stayed in the same hotel where we did: in the Albergo Italia.


At the reception of Italy Hotel – with the poster of the Carlo Bo memorial conference in the background – a postcard from 1934 advertises that it counted as a prestigious hotel already at that time. Curiously, if you do not require a room with hill panorama then this is also one of the cheapest hotels in the town. Sitting at the breakfast tables under the arcades of the inner courtyard we have a view of the hillside from where at the previous sunset we have taken the above photo of the town seen from the south-west. It is a strange feeling to sit in your own photo.


Nevertheless, if you do not only spend a half day here as we did now, you can also do what we have long wished to do: to stay for some days in an agriturismo, an ancient lonely farmhouse in the nearby mountains converted into an inn. There are plenty of such places all over Italy, and especially in Marche. The accomodation is less costly, more archaic and perhaps also more personal than in the town, the environs are splendid, and you must only make up your mind to drive some kilometers along zigzag mountain roads even in the late night after a dinner taken in the town. Places like this include for example the Colcello, the Cà Gnoni, the Girfalco (“Falcon-flyer”, where you can also learn hawking, and whose panoramic photo taken from here was inserted above), or the Locanda della Valle Nuova, whose young mistress Giulia and her parents practice bio-economy in their several hectares large estate, maintain a small library of local history for their guests, organize courses of wool-dyeing, and she writes a blog in English on the sights and events of the zone. To go through the web sites of the several dozen similar places in the neighborhood is a magnificent travel in itself.