Thursday
4th
May
So, for the third time in as many months I
find myself in the Heathrow Pret with an Americano and an almond
croissant. This time it's this year's Travel Editions trip with Clare
Ford-Wille and the gang, to Urbino. Lots of familiar faces and hugs at the
gate, but Barbara, the usual tour manager, has been replaced by Tessa, who
was to cope admirably and calmly with more than her fair share, it turned
out. Aside from the usual fuss-budgetary complications, vegetarian needs and
unplanned church closures she had to cope with stuff like (spoiler alert!) a
traveller suddenly bed-ridden and one of our number fainting in Gubbio,
twice. The flight was to Bologna - again not for the first time for me this year
- and it even landed 15 minutes early. A smooth transfer to our coach and
then a longish drive, with a stop at a motorway services for lunch, where
the food was fine - far superior to what you'd get at a similar joint in
the UK.
Then it was another hour on the coach until we caught sight of Urbino, but
before heading in we visited the Oratorio di San Bernardino (see right), the burial
place of Federico and Guidobaldo Montefeltro and a lovely example of the
orangey-honey colour of the local brick. The calm
interior, not unlike a Brunelleschi, just about survives later additions and
some 'concealed' fluorescent tubes. This is the church for whose high
altar Piero's famous Pala Montefeltro (or Pala di San Bernardino)
was painted, you know: the one with the egg dangling above Mary, which is
now in the Brera in Milan.
In Urbino our coach had to park down
the hill and we had to catch the lift up and pass before the spectacular
palace towers (see below right). My room at our hotel, the Albergo San Domenico, was a bit
spartan, but quiet and bright, it turned out, with a fine view of the
side of the ducal place and along to the Duomo. And in the corridor as I was
finding my room who should I bump into but Patrizia - the tour manager
from my Rome trip with Art Pursuits last year, who was here with a
coinciding
AP group!
A short rest, and then a 6.30 regathering for prosecco and a lecture on The
Patronage of Federico di Montefeltro, before dinner in the hotel. There
where more vegetarians on this trip than the usual tally. I was sad to miss out on
the chick pea and pasta soup, due to its chicken stock, but our pasta with
vegetables substitution was tasty enough. A main course of two bunless veggie
burgers was odd but OK, with rosemary fried potatoes.
Friday 5th May
Nothing special or tragic to report re. the
hotel breakfast. We had a full day in Urbino today, beginning with a
morning at the Palazzo Ducale, which also houses the Galleria Nazionale
delle Marche. So, we saw famous rooms and some special paintings. Firstly
some rooms with fragments of frescos, then the studiolo with
its fine and famous intarsia work. The paintings included the amazing and
puzzling Piero Flagellation, a very damaged Bellini, and interesting
pairs of works by Titian and Raphael. Also a room giving good Barocci.
The Ideal City panel, often wrongly attributed to Piero, is here too. It
being most famous for being a very early banner image on the famous Fictional Cities
website. Wonderful to see it up so close as to fall into it. Justus of
Ghent, Uccello, and Giovanni Santi (Raphael's dad) also make this gallery
worth a visit. As do the big and atmospheric basement rooms - stables, laundry,
kitchen etc. Lunch was some excellent pasta with artichokes, cherry
tomatoes and spinach, followed by a cocco gelato.
Our afternoon visits began with the Oratorio di San Giovanni Battista with
its spectacular and vivid frescoes by the Salimbeni brothers. The scenes
of the The Life
of Saint John the Baptist (or Saint John the Precursor, as he's known in
Italy) take up the wonderful right wall, with more damaged scenes and other bits opposite, and a
jaw-dropping Crucifixion behind the altar. Anything following this
couldn't fail to be a bit of an anticlimax, as the stock baroque Oratorio
di San Giuseppi was, although the grotto-like room with The Nativity here
was oddly impressive. Raphael's house was just OK too. Our evening
lecture was followed by another dinner in the hotel, which was again not
bad.
Saturday 6th May
Today to Gubbio, on a coach through some
awesome unflat country. We began with the church of Santa Maria Nuova,
with its lovely Madonna del Belvedere fresco panel (see above) by Ottaviano
Nelli, our hero of the day. After coffee (or in my case a thin and tepid
hot chocolate for €4) in the Piazza Grande we visited the Palazzo dei
Consoli to see frescos, majolica, apothecary pots and the various rooms of
the Municipal Art Gallery. The paintings mostly evoked the modest joy of art that's not of the first rank, but there
were some quiet gems nonetheless, by unfamous names. After lunch it
started to rain most seriously, as we headed for the Duomo and found it closed.
The Palazzo Ducale opposite, another palazzo of Federico
di Montefeltro, is smaller than the one in Urbino, and almost totally
stripped of art and fittings, including the intarsia panelled walls of his
studiolo here, now in the Met in New York, and here replaced by replicas
giving a fair impression. The reproductions of paintings placed above
the panelling (including two which are in the National Gallery) are placed there in contradiction to
most scholarly opinion, however.
The other rooms here contain some art of polite interest which is, however, not
really connected with the place. On the walk downhill there was just time for a quick gelato (nocci
& fichi and limone) before our last visit, to the church of San Francesco,
to end on the very high note of our man Ottaviano Nelli's fresco cycle of
The Life of the Virgin in the chapel left of the apse.
In the evening Tessa and Clare took some of us to a restaurant which,
considering it was the third choice, numbers one and two being closed, was
something of a find and a true treat. I had tempura vegetables, spinach
and ricotta lasagne rolls, and apple pie (actually more a muffin) with
cinnamon gelato. And the swiftness and efficiency with which Tessa added
up what we all owed at the end was a feat I'll not soon forget.
Sunday 7th May
After breakfast, at which I made the joyful
discovery, amongst the fresh fruit, of a bowl of warm baked apple chunks
sprinkled with cinnamon, we coached it to Pesaro. Before heading for the
centre we began
with a detour, to admire the outside of the Villino Ruggeri, a wonderful art nouveau seafront
house (see above right). It was built between 1902 and 1907 for
industrialist Oreste Ruggeri by an architect called Giuseppe Brega. (Art
Nouveau is called Stile Liberty in Italy.) In town, after a coffee break, at which I finally got
some real
thick and dark hot chocolate, we made for the Museo Civico, which doesn't have
a lot of art, but does have an utterly wonderful big early Bellini altarpiece of
The Coronation of the Virgin. After a pasta lunch a few of us went
to look at the sea, on the way finding a gelateria which provided a
holiday highlight in the form of a pear, ginger and cinnamon
sorbet. We returned to meet the rest of the group and have a look at
the fort designed by Luciano Laurana, the architect of the Urbino Ducal Palace, before
catching our coach to the airport. Speedy check-in was followed by the
security queue from hell, a ricotta and almond canollo and coffee, and a
delayed flight. Automated passport control at Heathrow was a breeze, our baggage was
waiting and circulating on the carousel, and Jane met me at the gate clutching a Heathrow
Express ticket. Our local chip shop was closed, though, so it was just
some quick beans on toast, in the company of our
glad-to-see-me cat, before grateful collapse into my own bed.
In summary - the thing with this trip was that the fullness of the
itinerary meant that I didn't really get to wander much in Urbino itself,
but the frescoes in all three towns visited, by artists with whom I was
not familiar, where very special. All the places and artists demand
further attention. As is ever the case we spent a lot of time letting
(often huge) school parties pass, and I've just read that this is a
particular danger in the months April to June, which is just when I always
go on these guided trips. The younger groups are often engaged with the
art and places, but the teenage hoards seem more interested in their
mobiles and schoolmates of the opposite sex, for some reason. I wonder how
my life would have gone if I'd been exposed to important Renaissance
palazzi and frescoes as a youth. Oh well, better late...
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