To try a rapid parade of the several monuments, churches, oratories, masterpieces, famous men, museums that make the "Ideal Town of Renaissance" so lively (a Patrimony of worldwide Humankind) is really a hard work to do. Urbino is a jewel of architecture to see by anyone of its several faces, in any reflection of its glorious history. Thus it's better to visit it, but you have to keep in mind some fundamental hints that can lead the traveller. Above all the Duke Palace, the Villa of Frederick  the Duke of Montefeltro that has got the soul of an Illuminist court that wanted the most famous artist of its age close to itself. Just start by Dalmatian Luciano Laurana who conceived that complex and articulated architecture that amplifies itself by the small towers and has left its one and only and uneraseable sign in the history of works of man. That is the first image of Urbino, the image of a "Town Palace" as the Castiglione said, where harmony dominates over any other sensation; both in the moveable façades and in the wide halls, in the small studios, in the linking corridors, in the courtyards; in the moveable wings and under the arches of the wide kitchens, of the snow collector rooms and the stables. The artists reached there from all over Italy not only to realize a project but a dream that us too we can live back intact. But by visiting the Duke Palace and the annexed Marche's National Gallery we remain bewitched by the masterpieces of Raffaello Sanzio from Urbino, Piero della Francesca, Tiziano, Luca Signorelli, Barocci and many other important artists. By walking along the ups and downs (as Urbinowas built up on the hills of a mountaintop), whatever direction is the right one. That's what the other Museums, the Botanic Garden with centurial plants in the courtyards and the oratories where confraternities  gathered with their offers in a religious heat; the necolassical Dome; all that just makes of Urbino a "Town Palace": a town that was built on the measure of man. It's not a case, in fact, that Urbino is a town of studies.

The University (one of the most ancient all over Italy), the academy of art, the schools for high specialization is just the result of the climate that the Duke Frederick left to his descendants. That's what his extraordinary farsightedness left: visible, smelling, artistic and cultural echoes. And from one village to the other of that magic Montefeltro area thre is the vigilant eagle of Duke Frederick; as well as the eagles that fly over those mountains by breaking the clear air.