Italian Capital of Culture in 2024 and a UNESCO creative city for music: Pesaro owes both crowns to Gioachino Rossini, born here in 1792 and celebrated every August by the Rossini Opera Festival, which draws opera lovers from half the world. The rest of the year the city lives at its own pace: Pomodoro's Grande Sfera on the seafront, the museums with Bellini's altarpiece, the imperial villa on the hill.
The historical detail that catches you out: from 1523 it was Pesaro, not Urbino, that was the capital of the Duchy of Urbino, under the Della Rovere. Before that it had been a Picene village, a Roman colony from 184 before Christ and a city of the Byzantine maritime Pentapolis, of which the mosaics under the cathedral survive; from the communal period comes instead the ceramics, still a trade here. Its everyday stroke of genius is the Bicipolitana, the bicycle metro whose coloured lines stitch the sea to the centre: few places in Italy are better to go round on two wheels.
Casa Rossini · Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta · Villa Caprile and 1 more
Casciotta d'Urbino
24 places to stay · top rated: Opera Suite Hotel Pesaro 9.6 · Villa Cattani Stuart XVII secolo 9.4
Festivals, food fairs and events throughout the year.
Nearest airport: Rimini Fellini, 27 km away
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📅 Every year, on 24 September
On 24 September Pesaro celebrates its patron Saint Terentius; the city is also the birthplace of composer Gioachino Rossini, honoured every summer since 1980 with the Rossini Opera Festival.
Casa Rossini Birthplace of Gioachino Rossini in Pesaro, a museum since 1892, renewed in 2015. Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta Pesaro's cathedral with a Romanesque façade of 1282-1312 and Early Christian mosaics under the floor. Villa Caprile Seventeenth-century Baroque villa above Pesaro with an Italian garden and water games still working. Villa Imperiale Renaissance villa on San Bartolo, extended by Genga for the Della Rovere, with terraced gardens. Sheep's and cow's milk, aged twenty to thirty days: casciotta d'Urbino, Michelangelo's favourite cheese, has been DOP since 1996.
Read more →Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Pesaro, but an easy day trip away.
