Interests

In addition to cooking, I include arts and travel in my list of interests. I have also enjoyed many years of volunteering on behalf of shelter pets and feral cats, and the four animals I’ve adopted are all rescues.

Travel is something I can regale you with a few photos at a time, especially when I learn to access anything older than last year when I made the switch from PC to Mac. Consider me technically challenged. Luckily Jim is technically gifted, which makes us a perfect match. I cook and he packs up the electronics. But he’s not always around.

So I love art. Took an art history course in college and fell in love. That’s partly because I had a great teacher. I took the next course then took Fr. John’s history course on Renaissance and Reformation because he made me want to learn. I had another mentor in college we’ll get to later.

This list is of my favorite art museums. This isn’t the best in the world, only ones I’ve attended and enjoyed.

In the USA: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cloisters in New York City; Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Guggenheim in New York City; the Timken in San Diego; the Menil Collection and Museum of Fine Arts Houston TX; National Gallery Washington D.C.; and Indianapolis Museum of Art in IN.

European: The Louvre in Paris; National Gallery London; New Acropolis Museum Athens; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Sistine Chapel and Vatican, Rome; Uffizi and Bargello, Florence.

I’m mixing in a church or two and will add Santa Croce and San Marco and San Lorenzo and Santa Maria Novello in Florence because their art, be it sculptures or paintings or frescoes, is incredible. Also San Miniato al Monte.

When I was a child my parents drove us to NY City for the World’s Fair. They brought in Michelangelo’s exquisite Pieta from the Vatican. One took an escalator down to a black room with a light shining upon the Madonna and her dead son, then an immediate escalator back upstairs. Security was tight even then.

I was six years old and knew that was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I remember it today, after getting my first application for an AARP card, as if it were yesterday. OK, I’m getting old but remember what I had for breakfast, too! A domani. Ciao.