Vatican 2.0--- Being Digital in Rome
Rome, City of 1001 Clichés
Twenty-four hours. A thousand years. Every cliché earned.
I feel as though I lived every one of Rome’s clichés in twenty-four hours.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Rome at Full Speed
We took a frenetic tour through the mind-blowing Sistine Chapel and Vatican City, home of the Pope.
Then came the best stadium ever built: the pedal-to-the-metal gladiator’s Colosseum. After that, the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain.
All Roads Lead to Rome
Ancient Rome is old. I hope I look this good when I am more than a thousand years old.
Rome was not built in a day, but it can overwhelm you in one.
Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day
The monuments feel permanent. The visit does not. The city gives you fragments—stone, crowds, frescoes, fountains—and asks your mind to assemble an empire before the bus leaves.
That may be the real Roman cliché: too much history and never enough time.
Fake It Till You Make It
The Russian mafia seemed much more forgiving than the Italian. Inside the Sistine Chapel, the 800-pound gorillas went mental over flash photography, protecting the originals.
Yet at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg the month before, windows were open. Sun and mist came close to Rembrandts, Picassos and Van Goghs. Many were without glass. I could have reached out and touched them.
On the fifteen-euro, two-hour tour to the Sistine Chapel, however, we could point and shoot at will. Then it occurred to me: the works we were photographing on the way in were replicas.
The DNA of Michelangelo is that he can never go out of print. The copy may become better than the original when analog eyes meet a digital world.
The Original, Reprinted
The process is called Giclée: an inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. NASA space photography first developed the technology for satellite imaging. In the early 1980s, Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young began experimenting with paint in an IRIS Graphics 3047 printer.
Nash Editions became the first digital fine-art printing studio—and the rest is history. WTF?
Graham Nash / Nash Editions