Casa Natale di Raffaello

The house where Raphael was born and learned to paint.

Address Via Raffaello, 57, Urbino

The Casa Natale is the modest house, halfway up the steep Via Raffaello, where Raphael was born and spent his childhood. His father Giovanni Santi was a respectable court painter, and the house preserves his small studio with the original stone trough used for grinding pigments.

The rooms upstairs are sparsely furnished but evocative — the kitchen, the bedroom where Raphael was born, the family chapel. The single Raphael fresco — a Madonna and Child on a bedroom wall — is the highlight. The house is run by the Accademia Raffaello and entry costs only a few euros. Closed Sunday afternoons.

things to do museum historic house
A story
Raphael was born here in 1483 to Giovanni Santi, court painter to Federico da Montefeltro. The young Raphael ground pigments and watched his father work — and on the wall of an upstairs bedroom is a small fresco of the *Madonna and Child* attributed to Raphael himself, possibly painted in his teens.