Four hours from anywhere, up a hill, with two of the strangest paintings in Italy waiting at the top.
The gallery's own description of itself is unusually honest about what it is selling: a collection of painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawings and furnishings from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth, kept inside the Palazzo Ducale that Federico da Montefeltro built to the glory of his family. That order of words is the right one. Almost every other national gallery I know was poured into a building afterwards. Here the building came first, and most of what hangs in it was made for these rooms, by people who had walked through them. I have read about it for years and I have never gone.
What I want from it is a specific and slightly unreasonable thing. Two panels: the Flagellation, which Piero della Francesca painted around 1459–60 in tempera, sixty-seven and a half centimetres by ninety-one, and which nobody can explain — the museum says plainly that its commission, its first home, its purpose and its meaning are all unknown, and that it came into the gallery in 1915 from the cathedral sacristy. And the panel called the Ideal City, which came out of the convent of Santa Chiara and may have gone there with Federico's widowed daughter Elisabetta, and which the museum now attributes not to a famous name but to an unnamed central-Italian painter of about 1480–90. A perfect city by an anonymous hand. I find that more interesting than any attribution would be.
The obstacle has never been the museum, which opens six and often seven days a week and asks ten euros. The obstacle is Urbino: a hill town reached by road from a valley, hours from the cities on either side, and it will not be made into a morning. So the plan, written down here so I stop rewriting it: spring, a night in the town, and the whole of the following day inside the palace — arriving at half past eight, before the school parties, and staying until they turn me out. Ring ahead. Small Italian galleries have seasons, and the hours on the site move with them.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.