WHAT INSPIRES YOU?

We didn't expect to find huge crowds at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, but when we arrived, we discovered a passel of police and hordes of people lined up outside the garden. The throngs of people had come to contemplate gentle beauty.

The gardens were celebrating Sakura Matsuri, a cherry blossom festival. We could see a smidgeon of pink as we peeked through the fencing around the park. The event was already sold out for the day with the lines snaking around the space between the gardens and the art museum next door.

We opted for the Brooklyn Art Museum instead of the crowded gardens, avoided another long line for a Frida Kahlo exhibit, ate lunch in the museum cafe, and took the elevator to the 5th floor so we could work our way down. We stopped to walk around Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, a large triangular table installation with hand-crafted table settings, each a representation of an important woman in history. I remembered Chicago's work when it was first exhibited in the 1970s. Her concept remains new and topical.

I thought of beauty again when we left our temporary stop in Brooklyn for Italy. Everywhere we went in Tuscany, we could see the effort to make a world a more beautiful place. We joined our son, his girlfriend as well as friends in a villa outside of Cortona, a town made famous by Frances Mayes in her book Under the Tuscan Sun.

We climbed the cobblestone streets of hill towns such as Cortona, Siena, and Assisi. We saw views from those towns similar to the countryside of California. In each town we admired the stone buildings and the abilities of the builders during the Middle Ages to construct buildings towering over our heads. We walked in cathedrals with soaring ceilings to stare at the paintings, illuminated manuscripts, walls decorated with murals, sculptures and minute details that attested to the spiritual nature of the people who built them. We visited the Galileo Museum in Florence and admired the detailed engravings on the scientific instruments and thought about their quest to find how to determine longitude. We stood under Michelangelo's David at the Accademia. We listened in the early evening to street musicians playing music that echoed against the old walls of the city.

We found more beauty in Assisi in a quiet corner of a building under repair. We were allowed in to see efforts of the plasterers and artisans who were repairing damaged plaster walls and murals that had faded and been eroded by water seepage. The work space was airy and clean and the tools used for the repairs were artifully arranged for display.

When we left Tuscany, we even discovered beauty in the light-filled, modern design of the Rome airport at Fiumicino, an ancient town that used to be a major Roman port city for ships bringing goods to Rome from all over the world. The Fiumicino airport serves a similar function bringing people from all over the world to visit Italy.

Lastly, we found beauty as our plane sailed over the snow-covered Alps on our way home.

         

The Alps from our plane window

Check out these sites in Italy:

Villa Bella Cortona https://bellacortona.com

The library in the Duomo of Siena https://operaduomo.siena.it/en/ which has large illuminated manuscripts lining its walls

Galileo Museum, Florence  https://www.museogalileo.it/it/

Etruscan Museum, Cortona  https://cortonamaec.org/it/
Ostia Antica, Fiumicino https://www.ostia-antica.org

Restaurants:

Caffe la Costa di San Rocco, Foiano della Chiana, 

https://www.yelp.com/biz/caffe-la-costa-di-san-rocco-foiano-della-chiana-ar
Dragoncello, Siena   https://www.instagram.com/dragoncello_siena/?hl=it
La Cantinetta, Florence  http://www.lacantinettafirenze.com
Tarumbo, Fiumicino  https://www.yelp.com/biz/tarumbò-fiumicino-2

Side note:
If you know trees, you know this photo is of plum blossoms, not cherry blossoms. They are easily confused. Here's how to tell: plum trees have deep red leaves, cherry trees usually don't. The cherry blossoms have a notch on the outer edge of each petal. They are often planted together for masses of color in early Spring.