With Batman and Borges in Urbino

Those who judge [the Library] to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end--which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.

--Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel"

Urbino in the old Papal Marche remains something of a hazy labyrinth to me. We stopped there for one drizzly, grey afternoon, following the maze of crooked, steep, black-cobbled streets to the top of the outcrop that so defines the town's geography. The great Palazzo Ducale of the Montefeltro house stands atop it, rising five or six stories above and a further half-dozen below. There, a concealed system of snaking ramps and corridors digs into the cliffside, covered by stone, brick and complex vaults.

It is a monument to cinquecento genius and refinement. After all, Baldissare Castiglione, the author of The Courtier, a sort of Renaissance Man for Dummies handbook, was a member of the Montefeltro retinue. However, I don't think of Castiglione's work when I recall my whirlwind tour of this vast palatial megastructure. The palace could easily, by sheer size and strangeness, be an Italianate cousin to the maddening, irrational fictive castle of Gormenghast, famous from the author Mervyn Peake's strange trilogy set amid its corridors.

It could go on forever, and everything seems to exist within it. Inside the town it stands as a maze inside a maze, a maze with libraries, stables, galleries, chapels, spiral ramps, loggie, tiny studies and vast camere, even a whole cathedral. As well as something which, to our modern tourist eyes, resembled nothing so much as a jacuzzi.

Furthermore, everything seems subtly off in its angles and hallways, as contingency and ages of differing building campaigns try to make sense of this vast palace. If it's a Renaissance Gormenghast, then the floorplan is straight out of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories. It's the Library of Babel that never has an end or a beginning, but is as big as the universe, and, like the universe, is fallen and thus full of truncated ordering, unfinished sequences, stifled perfection. Walls jut in at seemingly-wrong angles cut with random windows with deep, pleasant stone seats beneath them, set on fussily charming spindly Renaissance plinths. And then there's the undercroft. I'll just say you could easily call it the Bat Cave and not be too far off.

Seriously. That's what Professor D. jokingly nicknamed it before he led us down the sloping ramp into a warren of enormous, Piranesian rooms, empty and weirdly purposeless with their whitewash and sail-vaults. A tiny door led up stairs into a high, narrow room occupied only by the rim of a well-shaft, cutting back down again far beneath us. It was supposedly the palace laundry, but it could have easily been a dungeon. Or Bruce Wayne's garage, serviced by about three hundred Alfreds.

Professor D., in a humorous mood, also said this was the sort of place where if you were to properly live in it you would have to wear big boots and a cape, and shout a lot. Probably correct, though your shouting would be lost in the vast rooms. It's hard to imagine what it was without the hum of activity that rightly belongs to a palace. The structure has been silenced by history.

The Ducal library was prominently placed on the ground floor, its principal room (now empty of any books, naturally) roofed by a vault painted by a blaze of fiery tongues spattering down from an immense, bizarre polychrome tondo of the Montefeltro eagle. The palace is a riot of symbols equally mazelike in their interlocking messages. The dynastic insignias of the house of Montefeltro mark every door lintel. They seem almost as encyclopedic as this universal palace as well, everything from compass dividers to featherdusters, eagles, as well as the omnipresent F C monogram. The signature of the first Duke, recognizing his Papal honors: Federigo, Count of the Holy Roman Church, as he styles himself on the frieze ringing the paradigmatically perfect brick-and-stone cortile at the schematic center of the palace.

But not perhaps at its heart. That honor goes to a much smaller, and equally perfect room. The Ducal study lies at the end of an endless series of galleries. Past the room of the King of England where James III Stuart pined for his unclaimed crown under a frieze of basketwork and stucco fruit. Past scores of remarkable doors inlaid with mythological figures with billowing hair and feigned perspectives. And these inlays are a hint of the richness to come. The study is tiny, windowless, crammed, seemingly in one irrelevant corner. Yet, this was where Federigo, one of the archetypes of the Renaissance prince, would retire away from the pressures of state.

It is, whatever its size, a princely room, an island of sanity amid the crooked corridors and intrigue of the court. Inlaid on the walls in meticulously-crafted marquetry are tromp-l'oeil cabinets crammed with lutes, clocks, armor, hourglasses and dozens of other treasures, the accountrements of the universal man.

Perhaps, like everything else in this melancholy palace, they're discarded, left behind, but I would like to think Federigo would meditate on them in this tiny closet, lit by candlelight. And then he would perhaps move on and step out onto the loggia a room away and look over his vast domains with their broad, misty hills and perhaps sigh. His palace is a wonder, but the word for wonder in the Latin of his court is stupor. Surprise becomes confusion. Once again, one feels Borges tugging at our sleeves, with his books of wonders and monsters that sometimes are the same thing.

One of the paintings that hangs in the court gallery is a Piero della Francesca painting with a title that can be interpreted either as the Ideal City or the City of Ideas. It is filled with broad, regular streets and grand palazzi, in sharp contrast to the mixture of deviancy and delicacy that characterizes the palace. Yet, there are no people here, a few potted plants, but not a single soul wandering those painted streets. I don't know if there's an ideal earthly city, a single perfect archetype we can build ourselves, alone. It's too tidy, too clean. My professors are equally doubtful, having lived in Rome's undulating streets for years.

Yet the palace, for all its Gormenghast strangeness, seems liveable in the same way a crooked Italian town is liveable. If only you remember the teeming thousands that probably would have lived under so great a roof. Servants, courtiers, cousins, sisters, aunts, visiting noblemen, idling aristocrats, ambassadors and spies. It's a whole city, and cities are strange only when they are empty. Batman's not Batman without Robin and Alfred, after all.