URBINO
The BCB Academy is located in Italy, in the magnificent city of Urbino, a city that for centuries has embraced and celebrated engraving art as a prestigious form of artistic expression. Here engravers of the calibre of Umberto Franci (1909), Trento Cionini (1919), Renato Bruscaglia (1921), Alceo Quieti (1922) and Eros Donnini (1928) were trained.
Urbino is the birthplace of Raffaello Sanzio (1483 – 1520), has had a university since 1506 and has been a UNESCO site since 1998. It also houses the Accademia Raffaello, the Accademia di Belle Arti (Fine Arts Academy), the Istituto superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (Higher Institute for the Art Industries) and the Liceo Artistico (Art School) “Scuola del Libro” and is therefore internationally recognised as a centre for art, culture and learning of artistic disciplines, as well as humanities and science.
The writer Paolo Volponi (Urbino 1924 – Ancona 1994) put it very well:
“The best time to visit Urbino is in September, between the 10th and the 20th of the month. During that period, you are likely to find the city relatively empty and therefore more open and easy to explore in days of particularly beautiful weather influenced by both the sea and the Apennine mountains with their endless ranges of hills and streams, under a deep blue sky unlike anywhere else. If you feel lucky enough to get up early in the morning, as you look out from the city’s towers you will find the Apennine landscape stretching out before and made golden by the first rays of the rising sun, with its valleys and the gorges below all bathed in a gentle white fog – a surreal sea like a miraculous vision or a proto-Renaissance painting.
Without doubt, it was just such a morning that inspired Urbino’s design – a plan for the ideal city, grounded at the juncture of the terrain’s innate components, measured and built in a perfect rapport of space, buildings, and practical function for its people, all brought to life by a shared culture lived and understood by all.”
(from Cantonate di Urbino)