Florence: A Visual Feast

September. Florence, Italy. Morning at the Uffizi. I approached the world-renowned art museum with a sense of reverence, awe and anticipation.

I reserve emotions about a building for only the most memorable structures I set foot in: The Supreme Court, White House, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, Chicago Museum of Art, Galileo Museum in Florence, the Pitti Palace and Casa Buonarroti.

This morning, as I stood inside the familiar cement-grey entrance to the Uffizi where a small crowd gathered with tickets ready for inspection, I marveled at how many times I’d stood in the same exact spot wondering if the same paintings, sculptures and sketches that thrilled me during my past visits would dazzle me with their same unexplainable magic.

Then again, why wouldn’t they?

How did these artistic geniuses, whose work appears in this gallery, create images using only canvas, paints and an assortment of brushes, that could thrill, excite and connect to strangers?

I wished I could step back in time and ask the artists whose images I have hanging on my walls in posters, “What were you thinking and feeling when you touched your brush onto the canvas? How did you know your vision or idea would connect centuries later with a woman who was so mesmerized by your painting she wanted to live with your art on her living room wall?

What was your inspiration to create such a perfect painting?

The person in front of me stepped up to the x-ray machine, put his keys, wallet and coins in a plastic tray then onto the conveyer belt. He walked through then waited for the technician to wave him past. This screening process has been going on for all the years I’ve visiting the Uffizi.

I was minutes away from climbing those familiar stone steps that seemed to go on forever – one flight, two flights, three flights, four flights to the gallery’s entrance.

Stepping inside the museum, my first eye-pleasing moment was always the magnificent ceiling comprised of wood beans supporting brilliantly painted frescos with enormous windows strategically placed in a hallway to let in light and a panorama of daily life in Florence unfolding beneath them: tourists in a boat floating along the River Arno, the Duomo off in the distance topped with Brunelleschi’s Dome towering above red-tiled rooftops.

I tried to imagine the transformation of the Uffizi Gallery during the Medici’s reign from office space for the royalty’s business enterprises to an art gallery today where tourists gather at the windows to marvel at the sight below and walk the hallways lined with frescos and portraits of the rich patrons of the Renaissance.

I found a quiet corner apart from the bustling tourists. What would Cosimo Medici think of the twenty-first century tourists meandering up and down his hallways snapping photos with their phones, many of them led by tour guides with little flags talking into microphones telling the story of the Renaissance.

What a fabulous, amazing story it is! It’s one reason why I keep coming back.