Francesco Maria II married for a second time in 1599, after a childless first marriage, and a boy was born in 1605 on May 16, the feast of S. Ubaldo, the patron saint of Gubbio, whose specialty was the miraculous birth of heirs to the dukes of Urbino. The baby was christened Federico Ubaldo. Francesco Maria II built a church in Pesaro to commemorate the birth, but the main monument to the newborn was a great library, built in 1607-09 in a park attached to the Palazzo Ducale at Castel Durante, the duke’s summer residence. The shelving was designed by a young Urbinate architect, Nicola Sabbatini (1574-1654). Sabbatini would go on to become a talented court festaiuolo and the author of the most famous book on stage design of the early baroque, the Pratica di fabricar scene, e macchine ne’ teatri, published in 1638. The shelving of the library was his first work. It was certainly splendid and we might say a bit theatrical, worthy of Sabbatini’s later career and of the great literary and festive traditions of the duchy.

For as long as the child, Federico Ubaldo, lived, the claims on the duchy of the papacy and the Grand Duke of Florence would be thwarted. He was betrothed to Princess Claudia de’ Medici in 1608 at the age of three, and in 1622 the couple was married and in 1623 produced an heir, Vittoria della Rovere. Federico Ubaldo turned out to be a wastrel, however, and died young, before he could succeed to the dukedom, possibly by poisoning, certainly after a period of riotous living. The voracious pope, Urban VIII Barberini, immediately laid claim to the duchy of Urbino, to take effect as soon as the old duke Francesco Maria II died. In his honor, the summer retreat of Castel Durante was renamed Urbania.

Vittoria della Rovere was betrothed as a little girl to the heir of the Grand Duke of Florence and took with her the fabulous art collection of Urbino. This is why there are so many Raphael’s, Titian’s and Piero della Francesca’s in the Uffizi today. Everyone has heard of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which was in the baggage of this prudish little girl. When Francesco Maria II died in 1631, papal troops moved in and until the Risorgimento Urbino would be a papal possession. What we now call the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino was renamed the Palazzo Apostolico. A later pope, Alexander VII, the pope of Bernini’s colonnade of St. Peter’s, took the manuscript library that had been built up by the great Renaissance duke, Federico da Montefeltro, in 1657. It is now one of the treasures of the Vatican Library. A decade later Alexander VII shipped the 13,000 printed books of the library at Castel Durante / Urbania to Rome to furnish the Biblioteca Alessandrina, the great Borromini library next to S. Ivo alla Sapienza.