This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
When I talk about my trip to Italy with anyone, invariably I’m asked what my favorite experience was. That’s an easy one, but as per usual, it’s probably not the answer most people would give or expect. For me, what rises head and shoulders above anything else we did during our entire 2 weeks in a country full of amazing things was our visit to Michelangelo’s Secret Room in Florence, Italy. I first learned about this room by researching unique places to visit in each of the cities in our itinerary on the Atlas Obscura website, something I highly recommend that every travel planner do.
Let me start by saying that we kept crossing paths with Michelangelo during our trip. Obviously, I don’t mean that in a literal sense. The man has been dead for 461 years after all. But he has definitely left his mark. I think he’d be quite surprised at how enduring and revered his work is. He was his own worst critic.
I will be blogging about many of these things in future posts, but here are some of the ways we encountered Michelangelo in Florence and Rome alone:
In Florence: Our breath was taken away by his sculpture of David in the Academia, by several of his works in the Uffizi Gallery, and by the Basilica of San Lorenzo which includes the Medici Chapel, inside and out. The “prisoners” series of sculptures in Academia were fascinating in that they were incomplete in ways that allowed you to study his sculpting process. The marvelous Florentine Pieta, now housed in the Duomo Museum, particularly captivated me because the figure of Nicodemus is actually a self-portrait of Michelangelo in his later years, and his facial expression would break your heart. (He intended that sculpture for his own tomb, but as with so much of his work, it was never completed.) In the Palazzo Vecchio, we saw his gravity-defying sculpture called The Genius of Victory, and also some graffiti carved in stone attributed to him from his early years that most people pass by without noticing.
In Rome: We saw his signature scratched in the ceiling of the Domus Aurea, and walked across the Piazza del Campidoglio, which he designed, on our way to the Capitoline Museum. We also marveled at his reworking of what is now the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, but which in ancient times was a Roman bathhouse. And of course, who could overlook his amazing artwork in the Sistine Chapel and the western end of the Basilica in Vatican City?
The man amassed more money than many princes of his time, but he led a very rough life, often sleeping in his clothes and boots, and only eating out of necessity. He was a homosexual, and it is quite amusing to see how hard historians tried to cover that up over the centuries. He was extremely melancholy despite the fact that he was so admired and loved. He led a complex life, and I would have liked to have known him, so I really enjoyed crossing his path so frequently.
You can only imagine how I felt when I had the chance to be one of only a relative handful of people on earth who have had the chance to enter a tiny room where he hid for about 2 months. I felt as though I could almost hold his hand and breathe the same air and pace back and forth with him. I could still sense his anxiety.
But let’s back up a bit. Why was he hiding? Well, that’s a very strange story. It makes me long to be trapped in an elevator with Michelangelo so that I could ask him some very probing questions that don’t really seem to be fully answered in any of the sources I’m reading. But all historians agree he had good reason to fear for his life.
The powerful Medici family of Florence had long been his patrons. He first came to their attention when he was 14 years old. They even sent him to school for two years, where he had the chance to perfect his sculpting skills. You might say they gave him his start. They commissioned him to do various works of art and architecture on and off for the rest of his life.
But in 1527, the citizens of Florence were tired of the Medici’s harsh and corrupt rule. They threw them out of the city and restored the republic. Naturally, the Medici did not go quietly. Florence was under siege.
Our man Michelangelo, who would have been 52 at the time, decided he loved Florence more than he loved his patrons and their financial support. So, from 1528-1529 he was the supervisor of the city’s fortifications. But in 1530, the Medici family regained their power.
Needless to say, the Medici were not happy with Michelangelo. You could hardly blame them, after all they had done for him. I mean, the entire family was despicable, but still, you know, if someone gives you your life on a silver platter, the least you could do is maybe remain neutral. I don’t know. This is one of the many things I’d love to discuss with him.
But to complicate matters even further, the pope at the time, Pope Clement VII, just happened to be a Medici, and he sentenced Michelangelo to death. So, yeah, our guy definitely had a target on his back. And that is why he hid in that room, where I found myself standing in awe 495 years later on the best moment of my Italy trip.
Oh, but the plot thickens. Guess where that room is. It’s right below the Medici Chapel. That’s the very chapel that the Medici had commissioned Michelangelo to create. Yup. The whole time he was hiding, his chapel he had been working on for the past 10 years, his unfinished business, which the very people who wanted to kill him were paying him to complete, was right above his head, and they had no idea he was there!
Let that sink in for a minute. Because I still struggle with it. I have so many questions. I mean, surely many people knew about the large trap door that accessed a room below the chapel.
The chapel is in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, which is just a few blocks away from Florence’s iconic dome. The prior of the basilica, one Giovan Battista Figiovanni, risked his own life by secretly keeping Michelangelo fed while he hid there. We know this because he mentions it, vaguely and in passing, in his private (at the time) diaries. He would have been the artist’s only human contact during that ordeal. He may have even been the one to suggest the hiding place.
That room, which is about 30 feet long and 9 feet wide, has only one tiny window (a second was blocked), has no plumbing and is poorly ventilated. There was a well in the corner, but it’s questionable how potable the water was, given the fact that during the restoration of the room, the corpses of multiple plague victims had to be removed from under the floor. Now the humidity in the space is closely monitored, but in Michelangelo’s time, it must have been damp and cold or swelteringly hot by turns.
The room most likely had no furniture in it, and indeed it is bare of furniture now. Today, the window looks out onto a busy street, but back then, another building was built practically right up against the basilica, so there would have been a claustrophobic view of a narrow alley. He most likely had to keep at least the main shutter closed as much as possible to avoid detection.
We all know what COVID lockdown was like. At least we had TV and the internet to entertain us, but most of us still went nuts with boredom. This, on the other hand, must have felt more like solitary confinement. Michelangelo is known to have struggled with depression even at the best of times, so this must have been torture. He wouldn’t have done that to himself if he weren’t genuinely scared.
Everything I have read says that all Michelangelo had was chalk and charcoal to occupy his time. There’s no way we can ever know what he had with him in there for certain. No books and candles? I can’t imagine that he didn’t beg the prior to bring him something in the form of entertainment when he brought him food.
There’s no denying that he drew all over the walls. But let’s just say that one man’s doodles are another man’s masterpieces. These things are gorgeous. He drew Leda and the Swan, some nudes including one that looks very much like his statue of David, and some that are similar to the statues he had created for the chapel above him. There’s also a self-portrait, a life-sized Christ, and some reproductions of images he painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There’s even one drawing that looks oddly like a cartoon and another that looks to me like a man attempting to perfect his golf swing.
The reason he emerged from hiding is that the Pope withdrew his order that Michelangelo be put to death. The Pope did so mainly so that he could complete work on the Medici Chapel and the Sistine Chapel. One would like to think that the fact that the two of them had been schoolmates and had maintained a lifelong correspondence played a part as well, but who knows? Regardless, there’s no denying that Michelangelo’s talent played a part in saving his life.
But here’s where another question pops up for me. If you are so terrified that someone is going to have you killed that you’re willing to basically entomb yourself, and then they suddenly say, “All is forgiven,” how on earth do you actually believe them and carry on working on their chapel, business as usual?
But carry on he did, for about 4 more years, until Pope Clement died. By then he was heartily sick of the Medici’s repressive rule of Florence, and he moved to Rome, safe in the knowledge that the next pope wasn’t a Medici. He never lived in Florence again. He also never finished the Medici Chapel. There would not be another Medici pope until 1559, and he was just a distant relative. By then Michelangelo was 82, and I’m guessing he figured he was too old for anyone to bother killing, so he remained in Rome.
He died there 6 years later. 88 is quite impressive for the times. Once he managed to survive to adulthood (which was rather miraculous on its own in that era), his life expectancy then leaped to around 60 years total, barring any plagues.
But let’s go back to that wonderful, magical, secret room, shall we? It’s believed that when he came back up for air, he himself painted/plastered over all his sketches. It’s hard to say why. We can only theorize. He was notoriously critical of his own work, and he would have thought of them, most likely, as doodles to pass the time at best, not something for public display. Also, if anyone had seen them, it might put his protector the prior at risk for having harbored a fugitive all that time. Either way, he had plenty of motivation to cover those drawings up, even if, from a modern standpoint, the idea of it makes us gasp in horror.
At some point, the room started to be used to store slack coal, so one can assume that it became dirty and smelly. Then, in 1955, there was no longer a need for the coal, and because the room was in such unpleasant shape, the trap door was shut and a wardrobe was placed over it, because, honestly, who would want to go down there or even store anything down there? Over time the trap door was entirely forgotten about.
Then, in 1975, the director of the Medici Chapel Museum was looking for a way to provide an additional exit for the museum. He walked into a small side room and moved aside the wardrobe, and he discovered the forgotten trap door. When he opened it, he saw a stairway. He went down and found an empty room and thought that with a bit of cleaning and renovation, this would make the perfect exit. But once the workmen started tearing down the old plaster and discovered what was beneath it, all work came to a halt.
Once the drawings were exposed, preservation efforts began. That took some doing. Salt had crept up the walls, which were moldy as well. There was also flood damage, and they had to remove those human remains of plague victims that I mentioned earlier. In addition, paint and plaster had to be carefully removed.
Finally, in 2003, the room was made available to art scholars. Many scholars were skeptical about the authenticity of these sketches, but once you see them, it’s all but impossible not to be convinced of their provenance. And then there are these two sentences, found among Michelangelo’s writings:
“I hid in a tiny cell,” he wrote, “entombed like the dead Medici above, though hiding from a live one. To forget my fears, I fill the walls with drawings.”
On November 15, 2023, the room was opened to the public for the first time. Since then, it has only been open to 4 people every hour and a half, for only 15 minutes, by appointment only, and there are only 6 or 7 slots a day. They are booked solid, at least at the moment, 6 months in advance. The reason for the small group size is to preserve the small room, and the reason the visits are spaced so far apart is so that the humidity level can be closely regulated. You’d be amazed by how much damage simple human respiration can do. Even having 4 people breathing normally in that space has an impact.
I couldn’t believe I managed to get us an appointment. I couldn’t believe we were standing there. It still brings tears to my eyes. What a privilege. What a gift!
Think of it: On a planet of 8.2 billion people, so few have stood on this very spot that making a Venn diagram of the phenomenon would render our elite group imperceptible. If the world’s population were represented by a circle the size of a dinner plate, I suspect that our dot would be smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
But one of the people who stood here, for two months, was Michelangelo. I could feel him. He was right there, next to me. I was all but watching him as he drew.
Dear Husband and I were there, along with two strangers and the museum guide. I didn’t want to freak people out by talking to him out loud, but I was talking to him in my mind.
“You must be so scared and lonely. I wish you fully understood your talent. Even these sketches, which you probably don’t take very seriously, are in many ways above and beyond anything that anyone, living or dead, could do, especially in a poorly lit cell while in fear for their life. And to only have this tiny window to look out of for two months. You must feel like you’re buried alive. If I could go back to your time, I would visit you. I have so many things I’d like to ask you. Admit it. You’re a leg man, aren’t you? I knew it! I would love to learn more about you and tell you what a gift you are to the world, even now. Thank you. Thank you, Michelangelo, for everything. Thank you for this room. Thank you for the personal integrity that forced you to be here. If I saw none of the rest of your work, this would be enough. Having said all that, my God, man, you stink. When you finally get out of here (and you will, I promise, so hang in there), please take a bath and change your clothes.”
After we left what I consider some of the most precious 15 minutes of my life, we went outside and walked around the building until we found the little window to his cell. I grasped one of the very bars that I’m sure he grasped late at night when the rest of the city was asleep. Tourists were walking past us, laughing and talking about what to have for dinner, totally oblivious to what they were so incredibly close to. Since I’m not Catholic, I can easily say that this overlooked place is one of the most sacred places in all of Italy. For me, anyway.
I know what you’re thinking. Shut up, Barb! Show us more pictures! Here they are. Keep in mind that the lighting was poor and the room was small, but we did the best we could. While I did edit the brightness of most of these photos so you’d have an easier time seeing things, I did not adjust the contrast or the color in any way. That felt too much like meddling with the art. If the man had wanted it to be more contrasty, he’d have pressed harder with the chalk. Also, Dear Husband tends to see the forest while I see the trees, so the close ups were most likely taken by me, and the rest are probably his. The videos are definitely his.
So, what do you think of Michelangelo’s fearful drawings in the darkness? Personally, I had a hard time leaving Michelangelo alone again in that room at the end of my 15 minutes. It felt kind of cruel, as if I were abandoning him to his loneliness. It’s a good thing he came out when he did. He was running out of wall space.
Love the images or hate them, it’s hard to deny that if these drawings were to speak, they would say, “Michelangelo was here.”
Additional Sources:
New lease of life for Michelangelo’s secret drawings
Michelangelo’s secret sketches under church in Florence open to public
My own vivid imagination.
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