This paper discusses Leon Battista Alberti’s vision of the paradigmatic city. In his De re aedificatoria, Alberti proposes how the architecture of both individual buildings and cities should be ordered and embellished. Borrowing ideas from the ancient writers on one hand, and reflecting on actual urban reality on the other, Alberti proposes an ideal city where the sacred and the secular come together in hierarchical harmony, beautified under the principle of ornament. In Book VIII, dealing with secular public works of architecture, he writes about the composition of a new humanist city that transcends actual reality. Ornament, a central idea of his aesthetics, supports his conception of the paradigmatic city.