Stupendous Sansepolcro!

July 1st-2nd, 2004.  Borgo Sansepolcro is located about 190 km north of Rome.  A small and quaint town located in southern Tuscany, it’s also the birthplace of one of Italy’s greatest painters, Piero della Francesca.

 
Piero was born in 1411 and died on the very same day that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492  (on October 12^th).  He was not only an extremely talented painter but also a theoretician and mathematician as well as the author of treaties on perspective and geometry.   

Perhaps his greatest work of art is the “Resurrection” (1460) which is located in the town’s Civic Museum.  

The English novelist Aldous Huxley called it the “…most beautiful painting in the world”!  And it was thanks to Huxley’s words that Sansepolcro was saved from further anguish during the town’s occupation by the Germans (and also by Allied bombings).  The British army in 1944 had been led by Captain Anthony Clarke who had read Huxley’s observation of that magnificent "Resurrection" in his 1925 book, “Along the road: notes and essays of a tourist”.  Clarke therefore spared the town further destruction by ordering an immediate ceasefire. 

 

Detail of St. Julian (1450) 

The "father" of accounting.  

And just a few km away from Sansepolcro lies the small town of Monterchi with another truly magnificent work of art by della Francesca, the “Madonna del Parto” (1464). 

We stayed in the rather nice B&B "Relais Palazzo di Luglio in Cignano", located about 3 km from Sansepolcro (www.relaispalazzodiluglio.com).