WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN LATELY?

Italy

Yxta Maya Murray

Novelist and Law Professor, Loyola Law School

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I took a rocking trip to Italy last summer with my husband. Carbs and art. I threw my discipline into the canal. I was on a constant pasta high. It was a pasta-soaked art orgy. Highlights would be Venice, which was like a drowning fairy city. You can see history disappearing like Atlantis. The Basilica of San Marco has Byzantine architecture. Inside it’s filled with mosaics made of gold. The gold shines down on you like rain. In Florence, it’s like there are ghosts in the walls because there are all these frescoes: the works of Michelangelo and the women who look like men. It makes you want to be a Renaissance prince like Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Discovery: My favorite museum was the Bargello in Florence. My favorite piece is by Michelangelo, of Bacchus. It’s a sculpture, really exquisite pornography. Bacchus is beautifully built, and he has this wine cup. There’s a little satyr eating grapes with this lascivious smile and cuddling up to Bacchus. You want to rip off your clothes and go running into the fields and drink wine.