Dessert: study abroad.

John Keats died on Friday. This happened in 1821, in Rome, in a house at the foot of the Spanish Steps. If you're not familiar with Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century traditions, in a time before airplanes, high-speed international rail, and mass communication, Rome sounds like a strange place for an English poet to die.

To be taken seriously as an artist, it was necessary at the time to spend part of your education in Italy, to study in the country that was the cradle and final resting place of so many talented artists, their canons of work, and the fertile period of the Renaissance. If you think this tradition is presumptuous, that's because it is. But it's also rooted in accuracy. It is not that Italy is an oracle, a magical font of inspiration or skill that visitors can wash down with their Chianti. Not artistry by osmosis. Rather, something happens when you look at incredible pieces of art, and I've never felt it more prominently than I did in Italy. A person drawn to creativity is forever changed when he looks at the folds of Michelangelo's gentle marble, sees in his Pieta and Moses the frozen but living emotions that have existed for centuries, thoughts turned granite..... or as that person's eyes wander the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where da Vinci's Last Supper commands the vacuous space. He spent four years painting it, and every hour of that effort is apparent to this day. In these moments, the work catalyzes a desire in you, not the same as but also not entirely unlike competition, and you discover that in the highest strata of art, the art itself becomes the muse. You appreciate the mastery just like everyone else, perhaps more so, as you dissect what it is within the work that elicits that reaction, what somehow turns splendor in to a glorious vise. You stand literally at the feet of the masters, and pledge in this moment of awakening to strive for more in your own work because, having seen theirs, you know what vast heights you are capable of reaching.

It is limiting and misleading to portray Italy as merely some campus for the university of the world. All art aside, just breathing in the vistas of Tuscany, the subtle brownscale spectrum of Siena, or watching the sunset over the perfectly-sized city of Florence, (and I stayed urban, so I can't speak of the beauty of Cinque Terre, the Amalfi Coast, Sicily, Sardinia).... these visions transcend your eyes, permeate your senses and convince you momentarily that surely you must have more than five, for nothing could be this vivid otherwise.

For many of my friends, Italy has been the apex of their travels. If I don't completely share the extent of their enthusiasm, I think I can understand it. There are more beautiful places than this, but there is a deep level of our world more palpable in Italy than anywhere else. Over 2,800 years of cultural passion has made the devotion of artists and architects and that reservoir of majesty tangible, attainable for us, and it has made the country feel more like a conduit. A gateway to the days when God still dreamed.

The sunset I watched on my last night in Florence came on the day that is most likely the exact halfway point in my travels. A symbolism not lost on me. And today, my last day in Europe, the official day when visits to cathedrals become visits to mosques and temples, is the one on which I close the chapter on my European vacation, and thus leave behind my comfort zone for something much dearer. Something that, after my experience in Italy, honestly feels a little like a graduation.


The rest of Italy: Venice, Milan, Pisa, and Siena-
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