Urbania

Urbania sits on the upper Metauro, thirteen kilometers downstream from Urbino. The original Ghibelline village was destroyed in 1277 and rebuilt seven years later by the Provençal Cardinal Guillaume Durand, who renamed it Castel Durante. The town passed to the Brancaleoni family in the fourteenth century and to the Dukes of Urbino in the fifteenth, who turned the Brancaleoni fortress into a summer Palazzo Ducale on plans by Francesco di Giorgio Martini from 1470 and used the river island as a hunting reserve, the Barco Ducale, fitted with a small church.

Through the sixteenth century Casteldurante produced some of the finest maiolica of the Renaissance, traded alongside the Urbino and Pesaro workshops. Pope Urban VIII renamed the town Urbania in 1636 after his own name. The Chiesa dei Morti, just off the centro storico, preserves eighteen naturally mummified bodies displayed behind the altar from 1833, dried by a particular mold that drew the moisture from the corpses in the original graveyard.