Italian language & culture summer course

The course consists of a part devoted to the teaching of Italian language (in the mornings) and a part given over to Italian culture (the afternoon and two evenings a week). During the weekends, walks around Urbino and excursions to cities of art are organised.

Protected by its town walls, the ancient city of Urbino is perched on top of a promontory between the Metauro and the Foglia valleys, surrounded by green hills that still today remind us of the landscaping that was given to them by the inhabitants of past centuries. The visitor who approaches it can already see the old city from afar, seemingly closed and turned in upon itself. It received its original shape, like the bows of a ship, from the Romans who founded the "municipium" of Urvinum Metaurense. This shape remained almost unchanged in the Middle Ages, but under the Dukes of Montefeltro the city experienced a miraculous metamorphosis, from which it emerged as one of the most beautiful towns of the Italian Renaissance.

Duke Federico da Montefeltro, a great "condottiero", statesman and man of culture, had his palace built by the architects Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and it soon became a place of culture. The greatest thinkers and exponents of Humanism and the Renaissance gathered around Duke Federico and his young wife, the Duchess Battista Sforza, first of all, and later around Duke Guidubaldo and Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga.

The palace – this "city in the form of a palace", as Baldassarre Castiglione defined it in his Cortegiano – blending in so harmoniously with the hills on which it is built and with the beautiful landscape surrounding it, became a model of courtly life for many courts of the times. This magnificent building has lost none of its splendour, not even during the dark ages that followed for the palace and for the city after the extinction of the Montefeltro and Della Rovere dynasties. Painters such as Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Melozzo da Forlì, Giusto di Gand and Pedro Berruguete, the writers Baldassarre Castiglione and Pietro Bembo, architects Leon Battista Alberti and Bramante, philosophers, the mathematicians Luca Pacioli and Paulus von Middelburg, poets Bernardo and Torquato Tasso, and musician Ottaviano Petrucci da Fossombrone all contributed to the glory of the court of the Dukes of Montefeltro. Only Raphael is missing from this list; he was born in Urbino but soon moved to Perugia, and then to Florence and Rome.

Other important figures of Italian culture were born in Urbino: the architect Girolamo Genga, the painter Federico Barocci, mathematician Federico Comandino, architect and mathematician Muzio Oddi and, in the twentieth century, the writer Paolo Volponi who retained his close links to his native city right until his death in 1994.
After a long and very difficult period in which the reputation of Urbino was lost, the city recovered for a short time when, in 1700, the Urbino nobleman Giovanni Francesco Albani was elected pope and, with the name of Clement XI, remained in office for 21 years. Some important building works in the city are due to him, as is the reinforcement of the Collegio dei Dottori, founded by Duke Guidubaldo at the beginning of the 16th century - in 1506 to be precise - and given recognition by Pope Julius II in 1507. This was the institution from which, over the centuries, the University of Urbino evolved.

In the early nineteenth century the despoliation of Urbino was completed, having been started after the death of the last Duke of Urbino in 1631. The city lost the important Library of Duke Federico, which went to the Vatican, many of the most significant pictures linked to its history, and all the furnishings of the Ducal Palace. It struggled to recover from all these crippling events and only began to revive in the twentieth century, restoring its architectural heritage and collecting together valuable works of art from Urbino and the Marche region into the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, located in the Ducal Palace.

Today, the city of Urbino tries to conserve its ancient buildings, while new districts have sprung up outside the town walls. The city has around 15,000 inhabitants and 15,000 university students. The Halls of Residence, where many of the students who attend the University are housed, have been built on a hill just a short distance away from the old town. The old town centre, on the other hand, has become the "university campus". Urbino University was a Free University until 2006, when it became state-owned. During the long chancellorship of Carlo Bo (1947-2001), whose name the university took in 2002, it was extended and consolidated and thus relaunched Urbino's true vocation as a place of culture where scholars, artists and men and women of letters from all parts of the world come together.

Urbino is the ideal site for a summer course in Italian language and culture. It is still a city on a human scale: distances can be covered on foot and it is easy for foreign students to meet the Urbino townspeople. In addition, Urbino offers those who show a spirit of initiative the chance to have contacts with University students and teachers also during August, as they are in the city taking part in the summer courses organized by the University.

For those who want to study, there are lots of opportunities here. Excursions by bus and car can be taken into the surrounding area to visit the cities of art in the Marche and the neighbouring regions, or to go for a swim in the nearby Adriatic Sea. The city, more fascinating than ever in summer, invites people to come together and exchange views.

The courses are held every morning from Monday to Friday in classes of no more than 20 people with an Italian native-speaker teacher with proven experience. Each individual course is for a total of 80 lessons (of 45 minutes each) of classroom teaching.

The courses are organised on the basis of the linguistic-communicative skill levels laid down by the Common European Framework of Reference, and are divided into elementary (four levels), intermediate (three levels) and advanced (one level).

After completion of the enrolment procedure, participants will be sent instructions about the placement test to be completed before the start of the course.