SUMMER 2009
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Legend says the rain stops falling, the clouds clear and the sun comes out when San Crescentino’s image is carried outside the Duomo in Urbino. On the first day of June Urbino’s patron saint is celebrated with a special mass, procession and feast. However, this year the rain did not cease. Participants were unable to [...]
High on a hill in central Italy, Giulia Savini can hear a collective ‘moo’ rising in intensity as she approaches a corral holding dozens of cattle on her farm, Valle Nuova. These cattle are happy because they know her visit means meal time.
For Savini, happy cows are important because Valle Nuova isn’t just about harvesting [...]
There are no visible signs advertising Ars Nova on the corner of Via Raffaello and Via San Margherita, just a line of multi-colored leather sandals leading up the stairs from the cobblestone street.
Owner Donato Colombo’s advertising philosophy mirrors the inspiration behind his original leather designs. “My products haven’t got a mark; my mark is the [...]
As the early morning sun warms the bricks of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino residents pull in laundry drying from clotheslines outside their windows. A pasticceria sets out warm, freshly made pastries accompanied with jams made from local ingredients. Artisan Donato Colombo is hammering away at the soles of leather sandals. By 9 a.m. the [...]
Strangers gather outside the Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale. Hands rise and fall. Rise and fall. Legs move from side to side. Side to side. The people don’t know each other, but they’re dancing.
Each summer Urbino hosts the Festival Internazionale di Musica Antica (International Antique Music Festival). During the 10-day celebration the narrow streets and the piazzas of this [...]
Imagine you’re a contestant on the quiz show Jeopardy and can win the game by answering this question:
“When was the first overhead projector developed?”
Would you choose:
A: 1700s
B: 1900s
C: 1800s?
To learn the answer we have to follow a story that begins 25 years ago in the famed Italian Renaissance city of Urbino, where Professor Flavio Vetrano, [...]
The smell of fresh breads and baked goods carries a visitor into La Panetteria Di Raffaello a few blocks from Piazza della Republica. The shop is large, with a display of sweets, jams and pastas on the left; little paintings on the right; and breads of different shapes and sizes behind the counter.
Paola Marchionni, [...]
At Magia, an enoteca (specialty wine shop) on Via Raffaello in Urbino, up the hill from the main piazza, bottles of wine are stacked on the shelves top to bottom. The place smells like hay and stone, and the gray-haired Italian men with their thin figures and wrinkled skin stand with wine glasses in hand, [...]
Walking through the narrow doorway of Luciano and Cinzia Bussu’s Casa del Formaggio on Via Mazzini, buyers are pressed against the cheese counter. There’s hardly any space to move, just one aisle going through the tiny store with the local cheeses in the cooler on the left, green grapes and nectarines on the [...]
”He is adorable,” says Chiara Delprato as she looks away from the baby for a second and moves her black curls aside to speak to the child’s mother. Delprato has always loved children but chose to devote her 20s to financing her education. Now, at 38, she is in law school and still dreaming about having her first child.
“It is not [...]
Elena’s eyes lit up with a smile every time her two daughters burst through the door of Sanchini, the ladies’ clothing shop she helps run in Urbino. The scene was hardly imaginable a few years ago when she was caught up in the world of a busy young pharmacist.
“I loved my job as a pharmacist and I [...]
On a Tuesday evening in early July Serra Alta restaurant is vacant; the cooking staff is in the kitchen busily preparing several courses for a large party. The heat outside is sweltering, but the staff plug away, creating sauces and preparing different courses before the evening’s guests arrive. Despite the heat, restaurant owner Otello Renzi [...]
Three times a year the Renaissance town of Urbino, Italy, is pierced with raucous laughter and song. Young students are seen marching into somber chambers before robed judges and striding across the piazza triumphantly crowned with laurel wreaths like conquering Caesars. Some are even thrown bodily into the town’s fountain.
Graduation day around this ancient college town is [...]
A tourist walking up the steep, narrow, cobblestone paths of Urbino toward the Palazzo Ducale to see the art work of Renaissance masters such as Raffaello, will also see a 4-foot-tall stencil of Maradona, the famous soccer player, spray-painted on the wall of a building. In a city of historic monuments and charming piazzas, streets [...]
It was a typical evening at the Piazza Della Repubblica, Urbino’s central gathering place, and the crowds were spilling out of the cafes and bars talking and laughing, sipping drinks, and licking gelato. In the midst of the revelry, a uniformed police officer walked about the square, chatting with citizens and chastising one group of teenagers for drinking out of glass bottles. No one [...]
Walking into the Urbino headquarters of fashion designer Piero Guidi is like walking into heaven: You’re surrounded by angels.
Everywhere you look – the colorful mosaic on the side of the building, sculptures that rise above the landscape, a giant bronze statue that seems to the guard the front entrance - you see angels.
“In Italy the [...]
It is a lazy Sunday in Urbino, Italy, but for Roberto Borfecchia this day means an outing with his father to get cresce, a dense but thin and flaky flatbread that is a hallmark of this city’s cuisine.
When Borfecciha was a child, the father-son trek for cresce was a special treat. “Now cresce reminds me of summer because [...]
Claudia Corsini, 46, a mother of two, always pictured herself as having a house full of children.
“Since I was a little girl I always dreamed of having a big family,” Corsini said as one of her two children, 9-year-old son Paolo, climbed on a play structure at a playground located in the Piazzelle Roma [...]
Empty beer bottles and old bent beer caps litter the floor of a small music hall reminiscent of a barn, on the outskirts of Urbino. The creaky wooden doors open outward and a stale smell of cigarettes wafts out of Club Do 7.
Fabio Barrone enters through the doors with his saxophone case and the rest [...]
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