The Ducal Palace was built during the fifteenth century by the Duke of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro, a military and intellectual man. The Ducal Palace is the physical symbol of the Renaissance, not a military castle thought to defense, but a building open to people and new ideas. It has very solid structures, harmonious external shapes and functional furnishings inside, it is like a city in the shape of a Palace. Among the architects who made the Ducal Palace one of the most exalted palaces of the Renaissance we remember: Maso di Bartolomeo, Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. The major talent works of the Palace have been attributed to Laurana, such as: the Torricini, the Court of Honour, the Throne Room, Duke’s Study and Library. The artist-architect-engineer Francesco di Giorgio Martini completed the unfinished parts of the Palace as well as the water system design. During the sixteenth century, when the dynasty Della Rovere took the duchy, the Palace underwent architectural changes. Since the devolution of the duchy to the Church, in 1631, the Palace underwent a slow process of degradation lasted for centuries.

In the 1912 inside the Ducal Palace was set up the National Gallery of Le Marche which takes about 80 rooms among the first and second floor full of paintings, frescoes, sculptures, furniture, tapestries, drawings and engravings: all works created between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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