Sculpted between 1519 and 1534, Michelangelo’s unfinished Prigioni (the Captives), now stand in Florence's Galleria dell’Accademia. They are half-trapped, half-free, frozen in a perpetual struggle to break out of the heavy, unyielding stone. Michelangelo believed that the sculpture already existed inside the marble; his job as the master artist was simply to chip away the excess stone to set it free. When we look at and think of these figures, we see a profound spiritual trut

Imagine a roof that follows you as you walk. In Bologna, that is exactly what happens. The Portico of San Luca stretches for 2.4 miles, creating a covered path of hundreds of arches that leads all the way up a steep hill to the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca at its summit. Holding the record as the world's longest covered walkway, construction on this epic structure started in 1674 to shield pilgrims from the weather during their hilltop processions. As I walked beneath

They say that these four magnificent bronze horses high above Piazza San Marco in Venice are Armenian. According to a tradition, an Armenian King Tiridates presented them as a royal gift to the Roman emperor. After decorating Rome for more than four hundred years, they were transported to Byzantium by order of Emperor Constantine the Great, and were displayed at the great Hippodrome of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. In 1204, when Constantinople was conqu