This year’s GE class had 27 engineers from 19 different countries – all regular engineers this time, and not an MBA or economics degree amongst the bunch! The day before the lectures started, the Environment Committee of the European Parliament held an important vote to rescue the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), now awash in carbon allowances. It’s not finalized yet, but hopefully I’ll still be able to talk about the EU ETS next year….. instead of giving a post-mortem report, like I have to do for the US SO2 market.

Most of the time, the engineers in the class will smile (or at least give a low groan) if I tell a nerdy technical joke, but this year I didn’t even bother to tell them about a bumper sticker I recently came across:

Calculus: The Agony and dx/dt

I thought this was absolutely hilarious, and quickly sent it off to my daughters (two of whom are engineers)….. but their response (huh????) made me realize that these young engineers wouldn’t have appreciated it either. For those of you under 60 still scratching your heads, the bumper sticker is a pun on a best-selling 1961 Irving Stone novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, later made into a film (of the same name) starring Charlton Heston. The book is a biographical novel of Michelangelo, but it wasn’t available on Kindle — so I bought an old, used college library copy (which somehow seemed more appropriate), and also checked out the movie on Netflix. I enjoyed them both very much!

In recent years I’ve made excursions back to the Accademia di Belle Arti to see David, and also to the Sistine Chapel and the Pietà in Rome…. [you realize, I’m sure, that not everything makes it into ‘Raufer Updates’!] So the book & the movie were just part of an ongoing, lifelong, never-ending Michelangelo appreciation tour — & this Florence visit allowed me to add a few more stops on that tour.

Hotel & Santa Maria Novella

In the first section of the novel, 13-year-old Michelangelo was serving as an apprentice to Domenico Ghirlandaio, and assisting him in painting frescoes in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella. A visit to see these frescoes wasn’t too hard to arrange, since I was staying in the Grand Hotel Minerva, immediately adjacent to the church. Other visits included the Sagrestia Nuova in the Medici Chapel of the San Lorenzo Basiilica (described in section nine), as well as his final resting place in the Basilica of Santa Croce (just a few paces from the tombs of Galileo and Machiavelli, other Renaissance notables).

Michelangelo’s Tomb

Also in that ninth section of the novel, a heavy-hearted Michelangelo leaves the city on horseback, and

“…turned to look back at the Duomo, Baptistery and Campanile, at the tawny tower of the Palazzo Vecchio glistening in the September sunlight, at the exquisite city of stone nestled under its red tile roof. It was hard to take leave of one’s city; hard to feel that, close to sixty, he could not count on returning.”

But the very next sentence reads: “Resolutely he turned the horses south toward Rome,” and the author notes that this genius/artist still had a third of his life remaining ahead of him, with some of his finest sculpture, painting and architectural works still to come. No wonder I liked the book so much!