Italian Art for Travelers
Your passport to culture, history, and art

St. Peter’s is a showcase of seventeenth century Italian art and the two personalities who put a defining plan in place to finish it. What P

Approximately six million people visit the Sistine Ceiling and Vatican Museums each year. Who made these treasures possible? Two popes from

Trastevere embodies an old world atmosphere with narrow cobblestone streets and a dynamic neighborhood. Literally meaning across the...

Roman political views vacillate equally between complaining and throwing their hands up as a lost cause. Manefestazioni and scioperi...

The Etruscans were the homegrown Italians, the native peoples inhabiting Etruria, just north of Rome to Northern Tuscany. Etruscan culture i

Caravaggio’s life was as dramatic as his art. He was equally known in Rome as an artistic innovator and trouble maker. Until recently, his d

Seventeenth century Roman art is one of surprises, contrasts, and drama. No one style predominated. Paintings could be evenly lit or have...

Fascists cherry picked iconic images as the perfect foil for disseminating concepts of cultural purity and superiority. The role of Fascism

Suffering Madonna overload in museums and churches? Are paintings of Annunciations starting to look the same? Now for something...

It was a gruesome site: a woman’s partially decomposed head eerily lit behind a metal screen. Her name is Caterina Benincasa, better...

Nothing brings on analysis paralysis like trying to decide on a paint color. Which shade of blue should I paint the bathroom? The sheer...

How Vincent van Gogh and a Roman Missal led me to study art history. From the graceful ornate elegance of the 1400s, to the classic figural

Venice slowly grew on me. At first the tourist mono culture was a turn off, a distraction obscuring the treasures to be discovered. My...

Would you gulp a fine wine or savor it slowly? Try enjoying art in the same way as you would a fine wine especially on April 14 for...

As I left the exhibit at the Met, a little overwhelmed, and took a taxi back to the hotel, my thoughts turned to three questions...

Michelangelo was active as an artist for some seventy years and the exhibit brought together works from his earliest teenage years to drawin

Why Venice? Venice is one of a kind. The location, geography, history, art, culture, and architecture are unmatched in mainland Italy....

Art is a business The making and selling of art may not be the world’s oldest profession, but it has been a commercial endeavor for...

2017 made art news with the attributed Leonardo da Vinci painting selling for an unheard-of price. This raises some interesting questions...

Is Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi real or a copy? Experts disagree.

Four Renaissance masters. Individually they were artistic geniuses. Collectively their bodies of work are considered the epitome of the...

The Italian language is expressive and the terms used to describe art are evocative and just fun to say out loud. Terms like chiaroscuro...

Lorenzo Ghiberti sculpted sixty-ton bronze doors for Florence’s Baptistery. Ghiberti’s masterpiece is the equal to Michelangelo in techniqu

Big Data 1400s Style A Florentine Snapshot It’s 1424 in Florence, the wealthy commercial urban center of Tuscany. Giovanni Bianco (a...