Among the various local specialties dominate those based on mushrooms and truffles used in the condiments of first courses but which also go well with meat main courses; in the area there are both the black truffle or scorzone, brought in triumph to Frontino in the festival that takes place on the first Sundays of August, and the prized white truffle, highly sought after and precious tuber with an unmistakable scent for the dogs of hunters.
Of Land and Fire. The Art of Urbania Ceramic
Feeling the water and clay in your hands. Forging the shape of a vase from scratch. Looking at the shapes of the ovens and objects that enchanted D’Annunzio. Ceramics can make for a rich and full holiday in Montefeltro. Casteldurante in 1636 became Urbania; in the seventeenth and eighteenth century skilled modellers and painters continued the glorious tradition, renewing the art with «the elegance of the shapes and the gentleness of the dough».
The Sown History of the Duchy
Montefeltro and the duchy of Urbino represented the ancient domains of Federico da Montefeltro, a warrior lord with the dream / obsession of the “ideal city”. His court was one of the driving forces of the Renaissance, like Rome, Venice, Florence. Each ducal palace (that of Urbino, that of Urbania), each hunting lodge respects the aesthetic canons of the Renaissance and not by chance recalls the proportions and ideal symmetry that at the end of the fifteenth century Leon Battista Alberti codified and implemented in the nearby structure of the Rimini Cathedral (built for the enemies of the Montefeltro, the Malatesta). Every architecture hides optical deceptions, secret passages, ancestral telephones hidden in the spiral coils of the stairs.
The Furlo Pass Nature Reserve
Hand-dug tunnels by the ancient Romans and the bubbling water of Candigliano that makes natural canyons: the third protected area in the province of Pesaro and, with its 3,600 hectares of woods, pastures and uncontaminated peaks, it is the greenest heart of the Montefeltro.
The Metauro: Guado and Carbonai
Montefeltro is really a dip in history and in the harmony that exists between history and nature. And again it is a combination that creates color: the intense blue of the ford and the poetic black of the charcoal burners. The ford (in Italian guado or guato or gualdo or vado) (Isatis tinctoria L.) until the seventeenth century was intensively cultivated, ground, refined and traded to color fabrics or paper. The indigo or Celtic blue color (also used to dye jeans) comes from this bushy shrub also widespread in the Marche. The processing of the ford (evidence of old special stone millstones are frequent especially in the area of the upper Metauro and Foglia valleys, in Cagli, Piobbico and Apecchio) reached a very high level of entrepreneurship so that from Sant’Angelo in Vado (or in Guado?).