Casa natale di Raffaello

The house was bought in 1460 by the Santi family, when Raffaello's grandfather moved to Urbino. Here his father, Giovanni Santi, painter and poet at the Montefeltro court, had his workshop, and here in 1483 Raffaello was born. The boy was orphaned early, losing his mother in 1491 and his father in 1494, and left Urbino for Perugia and then Florence and Rome.

Since 1873 the house has belonged to the Accademia Raffaello, which has turned it into a museum. It is a real fifteenth-century gentleman's house: the courtyard with the stone on which, according to tradition, colours were ground, the kitchen, the rooms on the upper floors.

In the room where the painter is said to have been born there is a small fresco of the Madonna and Child: tradition attributes it to the very young Raffaello, scholars waver between him and his father. On the walls are copies of his masterpieces and works by Giovanni Santi and other painters of the time.

The visit lasts less than an hour and stays entirely on Via Raffaello, halfway up the climb to Piazzale Roma. Combining it with the Palazzo Ducale, where La Muta hangs, is the best way to understand where the most famous painter of the Renaissance came from.