Attractions

Sansepolcro's Artistic Legacy

Sansepolcro's only outstanding sight is the Museo Civico, housed in a 15th-century building that was once the Palazzo Comunale. An outdoor staircase runs to the former main entrance, now a glassed-in doorway where you can see into one of the museum's main halls. There you can gaze on Piero della Francesca's masterpieces at any time of day or night -- Sansepolcro's singularly unselfish way of opening its artistic patrimony to everyone, regardless of whether one buys a ticket to the museum. A local, nodding approvingly, called the arrangement "highly advanced."

The palace is connected by a bridge to a perpendicular building, the 14th-century Palazzo Pretorio, embedded with two orderly rows of della Robbian terra-cotta coats of arms left by previous mayors. Both palaces were heavily restructured in the 19th century. If you pass under their connecting bridge and cross the street, you'll be on a small piazza flanked on the right by San Francesco and the left by Santa Maria delle Grazie. The former has some baroque canvases and a 1304 Gothic sandstone altar carved with reliefs; the latter is fronted by a 1518 double loggia and preserves a small Madonna in Prayer by Raffaellino del Colle and a wood ceiling carved by Alberto Alberti.

Back under the bridge connecting the palazzi, you'll see the huge portico of the late-16th-century Palazzo delle Laudi across from them. Next door is Sansepolcro's Duomo, with a Romanesque-Gothic interior. On the right wall is a fresco of the Madonna with Saints Thomas Becket and Catherine of Alexandria (of whom only the iconographic wheel remains) painted by a Rimini-school artist in 1383. Just past it is Santi di Tito's baroque Incredulity of St. Thomas (1575), followed by a faded Bartolomeo della Gatta fresco of the Crucifixion. Behind the high altar is Niccolò di Segna's polyptych, whose "Resurrection of Christ" scene heavily influenced Piero della Francesca's famous version now in the Museo Civico. To the altar's left is a 10th-century wood Volto Santo crucifixion. Between the first two altars on the left wall is an Ascension by Umbrian master Perugino, restored in 1997, as well as a Resurrection by Raffaellino del Colle.

Just below the Duomo is Sansepolcro's main square, Piazza Torre di Berta, named for a tower demolished in World War II. Off its right side runs the main shopping street and passeggiata drag, Via XX Settembre. Three blocks down is the intersection with Via L. Pacioli, which leads all the way to the southern city walls at Via Santa Croce and the deconsecrated church of San Lorenzo. Only die-hard Rosso Fiorentino fans need bother hiking down, as there's no guarantee you'll find anyone in the lace-making school or Choral Society headquarters next door to let you inside to see Rosso's darkened Deposition.