Urbino

Urbino is a perfect Renaissance city that history set on a hilltop and then, mercifully, forgot to ruin.

This small walled town in the northern hills of Marche was, five hundred years ago, one of the most brilliant courts in Europe, and it still looks the part: a UNESCO-listed core of brick palaces, towers, and domes rising over green countryside, crowned by the great Ducal Palace and the national gallery of the Marche inside it. Raphael was born here. And yet Urbino is not a museum, it is a living university town of about fourteen thousand, where students and locals fill the streets year-round and the place keeps its pulse long after the day-trippers have gone, which is more than most beautiful hill towns can say.