Pietrarubbia lies in the Montefeltro, perched on a crag at the foot of Monte Carpegna, and its name comes from the colour: Pietra Rubea, red stone, like the rocks it is built on. Tradition holds that its castle, of the eleventh century, is the ancestral home of the Montefeltro, the family that gave its name to this whole country and its dukes to Urbino. The fief had been granted by Otto I to the counts of Carpegna; then came the Malatesta, the Montefeltro themselves and finally the Papal State, and the village became a comune of its own only in 1947.
The old village emptied in the nineteen-fifties, and seemed bound to stay a ruin. It was a sculptor who put it back on its feet: in 1990 Arnaldo Pomodoro founded here, together with the comune, the TAM, the centre for the artistic treatment of metals, a school where young people learn to work bronze and iron. Since then the village has filled up with artists. A little outside, towards Mercato Vecchio, where the town hall stands, rises a solitary mass of rock, the Pietrafagnana, with the vertical spur that people here call the Devil's Finger.
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📅 Every year, on 31 December
On 31 December Pietrarubbia celebrates its patron Saint Sylvester, to whom the town's church is dedicated; at the end of May the "Festa d'la Falciatura" recalls farming customs of the past.
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 Pietrarubbia, but an easy day trip away.
