ABSTRACT
In the way a traveler can go off on a different kind of journey, one where she searches for the visceral world of a historical person by retracing the emotional places in that person's life. One summer, the author visited friends from New York who had bought a house in Arezzo, Tuscany. She had to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Renaissance man, Buonarroti Michelangelo one of the greatest inventive and tormented geniuses ever born. Five hundred years after he created his masterpieces–the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Pieta, and his David–the author set off on an adventure in search of this man who reinvented art, with his life as the raw material. Then on to Florence and the Galleria dell'Accademia to see his David and the Bearded Slave, chiseled out of Carrera marble. Michelangelo glimpsed the slave in the marble and carved until he set him free.
