There is something very strange about seeing Brunelleschi’s dome out of the airplane window. Brunelleschi's Il Duomo from an airplane window Please, I just want to get off. The thought repeated monotonously through my head as our plane flew slowly over Britain. I was curled up, scrunched, and twisted in my seat. My classmate in front of me had her seat leaned down back into my knees. Cheap pasta sat cold on my tray along with a full cup of orange…something—thinking of food

L’arte non è mai finita, solo abbandonata. Those are the truest words. We lost the right to finish created works, long ago. The Fall and The Temptation, opposite of each other in the chapel, high above, reminded me of that. That is why the background of the Temptation is blank—we could no longer see divine beauty. But still, we remain somehow close to it: the angel casting out Adam and Eve said that much. Massacio's Brancacci Chapel (1425-27) “You’re at the feet of your ma

I swayed on the bench, hunching forward to stare at the plain, sand-colored wood floor. Nausea both from exhaustion of having gotten lost last night—not getting to our apartments till one in the morning—and from rushing to hurry to the Vatican—that would not even let us in properly (it is a pdf, guard!)—were taking their toll. Fifteen of us crowded the white bench before the staircase to the chapel. The most infamous one. The Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel (15

My brain was murdered in that room. I had been looking forward to this most, since I missed the second visit to the Uffizi Gallery because of that stupid illness. Smiling at the banner above our heads, covering the construction and restoration of the front of one of the Medici’s seven old villas in Florence, I swung side to side, waiting for two more classmates to join us. Gozzoli's Chapel of the Magi (1459-1463) We pushed ourselves up a flight of stairs. Then another set.

I was more ready to go back home, than to go home. I sulked at the pillar at the other side of the terminal, waiting for the Flyaway Bus. As much as I did not really want to go back to home, with tasteless cement boxes for houses and food with more fluff than filling, at least I was no longer on seven hours of dehydration in a plane bouncing on air. Yet it felt like I had left a home at the same time. LAX I was not the only with the same sentiment. The bus came. Luggage wa

I’m not entirely sure what happened when I walked into that room. Maybe I drowned. Maybe I ascended. Maybe a part of me died. Maybe all of me lived. Botticelli's Birth of Venus (1482-86) I can’t tell anyone what to expect when you see it. There’s nothing you can expect, because there’s nothing you can do to expect it. It’s sudden and slow. Like the rush of adrenaline of seeing a tidal wave, but the time slows so the magnitude does not hit till you are too far under the wave