Urbania

This town has changed its name three times. It was called Castel delle Ripe, it was a free comune of the Guelph party, and for that reason in 1277 it was destroyed by the Ghibellines of nearby Urbino; the survivors went down the valley and gathered around the walls of the Benedictine abbey of San Cristoforo del Ponte, on the exact spot where the co-cathedral stands today. Around 1284 pope Martin IV entrusted the founding of the new town to a Provençal prelate, Guillaume Durand, at the time governor of Romagna and of Urbino, who gave the building of it to technicians from Bologna: to them is perhaps due the solution of the two porticoed streets that make Urbania a sort of Bologna in miniature. In Durand's honour the town took the name Casteldurante, and kept it until the seventeenth century, when pope Urban VIII raised it to the rank of city and diocese and it took, for the third time, the name of the man who had promoted it: Urbania.

For a town of seven thousand people, there are a good many things here you would not expect. The last duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II Della Rovere, moved his court here, lived here to the end and is buried here. In the ducal palace there are globes made in the middle of the sixteenth century by Gerardus Mercator. In the Church of the Dead, behind the altar, eighteen natural mummies of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are on show. And outside the built-up area a marker set in 2017 fixes a point that holds for the whole planet: here is the international reference for the beginning of a geological age, the Chattian. Urbania has been making majolica for centuries, and it is a martyr city: on 23 January 1944 the Allied bombing cost it 248 civilian lives, and the anniversary is solemnly kept every year.