Sassocorvaro

A millennium after the birth of Sassocorvaro, resilience arrived in Montefeltro: not armed – it was in the late 1930s – but cultural. The Ministry of Education appointed Superintendent Pasquale Rotondi with the task of identifying and safeguarding as many Italian works of art as possible from the risks of the world war that was about to break out.

Rotondi initially thought of Urbino, but discarded the idea because there is an important military depot in the capital that could be bombed. He chose instead the Rocca Ubaldinesca in Sassocorvaro, an elegant but above all robust late 15th-century architectural creation by Francesco di Giorgio Martini. In the words of Rotondi himself, it was to be "the most important grouping of artworks ever made in the world". From Venice, Urbino, Pesaro, Fano, Ancona, Lagosta, Fabriano, Jesi, Osimo, Macerata, Fermo, Senigallia and Ascoli Piceno, almost ten thousand works by Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Titian, Carlo Crivelli, Carpaccio, Mantegna and Raphael - to name just a few - arrived in Sassocorvaro. If they still exist, it is because of Rotondi and Sassocorvaro. The story was the subject of a major exhibition at the Quirinale in Rome between 2022 and 2023, but is still documented in the Sassocorvaro fortress, in the rooms of the Ark of Art exhibition.

In addition to the picture gallery housed in Rocca Ubaldinesca - so called because it was left by Federico da Montefeltro to his half-brother Ottaviano degli Ubaldini - mention should also be made of the town's collegiate church and its views. We are, after all, in the "sentinel of Montefeltro".