Today the air is clean in Shanghai; the brown of the buildings beyond my window reminds me ever so slightly of the brown in the deteriorated marble in the Roman coliseum, of Florence’s Ponte Veccio, and even further still, of the Catedral del Pilar in Zaragoza which I walked by twice daily on my route to and from school during my senior year. I have quietly spent my life leaving myself in different places. As I write this I almost feel as though I am made up of still cast shadows which expand and shrink with the sun, and my infinite distance from them. My walls are covered in polaroids for this same reason, and I have written more than once throughout the last three years that my body feels like a chalk outline being washed away continuously, or like an open window with curtains billowing from the force of my own exhalations. I continuously move throughout the world hoping that the momentum pushes me forward into a new person, more specifically, the person that I am hoping to become. This, perhaps, is the wrong reason to travel, but it is mine just the same. I spent my summer walking the streets of Florence in just the same way that my blood runs through my veins. I continuously matriculated back to the Uffizi museum, and found myself recycled through stages of human experience. I had a class in front of Michelangelo, took a very unashamed selfie with Leonardo Da Vinci, and talked to Raphael about his favorite librarian or his lover, and the pearl in her painting, and although these masterpieces have seen far more faces than I, I found myself reflected back in them, and this was the true beauty of my summer abroad. My feet learned to adjust to standing for five hours in museums, my eyes became fluent in classical painting, in allegory, and in symbolism. But most importantly, fluent in the lives of people who, despite unfortunately being dead, still live on in heavy frames and now in my memory. Each painting and sculpture taught me that freeing my mind from its ignorant constraints is as simple as opening my eyes to the lives of those I do not know, exchanging positions with a culture, and smiling at strangers. Florence and its Masters in Renaissance Art class built upon my foundational appreciation for life as art, and visual art as storytelling. I suppose I should elaborate more on the knowledge that I gained, but I find it impossible as talking about my experience in Italy feels both euphoric and paradoxical, as though my mind was caught in a dream catcher, or a net hanging over a newly distinct reality. To attempt to discuss why I chose Florence over any of the other sites offered by NYU’s global network, I must begin at the start, with what I learned during my first experience studying abroad in NYU’s Global Network. Although my mother minored in Art History, it was my father’s heavy hand with words that created a literary culture for me as I grew. He scared my siblings and I on long car trips with improvisational yet terrifying stories of us facing near-death in ridiculous scenarios, among these sits with me the popular “The Cave of the Bird-Man”, and the feeling of near suffocation underneath the ocean as we hunted for lost treasure. By seventeen, I was convinced that the only art I needed was the art of vibrating vocal chords, dog-eared pages creased on places I’d return to, and an imagination like my father. When the opportunity arose to expand my artistic horizons, I chose to take Arte Contemporanio in my senior year because it offered me a trip to Paris, and not because I enjoyed art. Factually speaking at that point in my life, visual art seemed like a waste of space. I fell in love, however, with the way Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (La Balsa de la Medusa) showed me momentary hope, and the way Goya’s Caprichos made me painfully aware that in my country, too, reason has slept for too long. At the end of this class I considered myself a changed individual, with eyes that could identify the world around me as though it were an SAT critical reading section. I felt smarter, more well rounded and full of life. It was this class that helped me find my way into NYU undergrad. Strictly speaking in choosing to do a term in Florence, one must leave the window for possibility open, for art to climb through and infect your life. In Italy everything is art, from the coffee to the gesticulation, and most importantly, the food. Life in Italy has gone forward into modernization and yet it has skillfully brought along for the ride, its inspirational past. Rome is a city of contradictions that feels completely at peace with itself. It is the best example I have found of modernity nestling itself next to antiquity, and the people of today’s world understanding that globalization is not new, and the world is not smaller than before. Italy weaves its position in history as a crux of human thought into its daily life. I became, almost sickeningly aware that I stood over stones in a crossing point both into the future and the past and in doing so, I like the culture, weaved myself into the experience of being alive within Italy’s borders. The feeling I got, of being important as a person, made me reflect upon why I chose to be a humanities major, and what that means. Human thought and knowledge are wonderful gifts that places like Italy can truly pass on to you, places where the past is situated not just in your own perception of the world and memory, but in the cobbled stones your bones walk over. It is a place where all at once you are aware of your own infinite expansion, and your possibilities because you see exactly what has gone into your understanding of the world. My summer in Italy was truly mind blowing. Although some may call this cliché,it felt as though my mind became a window being blown open by wind, abruptly torn into by nature, and a room refreshed with new air. I highly recommend it for anybody trying to capture within themselves a truth that they simply cannot express presently, without a deeper and conscious understanding of one of the many facets of our humanity. I truly left part of myself in Italy, but carried with me an even bigger part of history. This article was written by Natalie Soloperto. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons