A Return to the Room of Sandro

For more than ten years I have walked as a pilgrim, collecting stories that became markers on the path of my life. Some places stay with us because they changed us, some because they hurt us, and others because they opened a window we never knew existed. Florence is one of those places for me, and there is one room in particular that calls me back. Not a hotel room, but the room where the first great works of Sandro Botticelli rest in silence.

I visited Florence once, in 2018, during a pilgrimage with a group that was deeply religious in a way that sometimes feared beauty. Certain works of art, they said, could lead to temptation. Certain images, they believed, could disturb the spirit. I heard things I should never have heard. I carried headaches that were not mine. I saw a church that did not understand art and insisted on hiding what heaven had allowed to exist. Yet even then, I loved art and I always will. Nothing can separate me from that.

After a long guided visit through the city, I was finally given something I never had on a pilgrimage, a free afternoon. I still remember the air, the light, the sensation of being allowed to breathe. I bought a gelato and walked alone through the streets, feeling Florence open itself to me step by step. My feet took me to the Uffizi Gallery, almost without planning. Inside, there were five people in the room, then four, then three, and eventually I found myself alone.

I sat down in front of Botticelli. I looked at the place where beauty and spirit meet in a way that no rule can control. His painting, the one that stands at the top for me in everything, opened itself like a revelation. It was not forbidden, it was not dangerous, it was simply truthful. In that stillness I felt something I had not felt in years, the permission to see and to be seen, the permission to feel without fear.

Since that moment I have known that I must return. Not as a guide, not as a pilgrim responsible for others, but as myself, with the freedom of someone who has survived and learned. I want to stand again in that room where Sandro painted what the soul tries to say when words are not enough. I want to return to that silence and let it speak to me once more.

Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (Spring), c. 1482, Tempera on wood panel. 6’8” x 10’4”. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.