I found this hyper-embellished wall in Siena, Italy, one day, just strolling with my camera. I love the triangles drawn on the wall on the right, the red filigree banner of  mythological animals (griffins? chimera?), and the richly colored roof tiles.

“I want to know one thing,” said Picasso. “What is color?”

There was a Renaissance chapel I was heading to on this road, just down the hill from the village of Cortona. And then the sun, just before it sank beneath the horizon, ignited this leafy view of terraces and cypress trees and yellowy shrubs, and it gave me such pause that I never made it to the church.

Says Martin Buber, “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

“I know not whether it is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the whole place has a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the leading color in the Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink, and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in. There is indeed a great deal of very evident brickwork, which is never fresh or loud in color, but always burnt out, as it were, always exquisitely mild.”

Italian Hours, Henry James