Recently I stood on a windswept hilltop overlooking Urbino, took a picture, and texted my husband. From five thousand miles away, he texted back: “Is that a painting?”“It is a painting,” I typed. “Well, it became one.”

Actually, the dramatic landscape around Urbino has appeared in many paintings. There is something about Urbino itself—with its undulating hills, dramatic monuments, and its vast sky—that seems to encapsulate the characteristic aesthetic of the Italian Renaissance.