The Baptistery used to be a pagan temple, but you'd never know it from all the Christian iconography there now. There's a famous story I learned in Art History 101 about the competition to create the bronze doors for this building, and I waited quite a while to try and get a good picture of those doors.

However, interest in them was so great that I couldn't get a shot without admirers obscuring the artwork, so eventually I gave up and went inside.

Looking up, the gilded splendor of these 13th century mosaics transfixed me. I hadn't expected to be moved by this... in a city where there's a work of genius around every corner, I was already becoming jaded.

But I felt something here, a peace that made me want to stay, head thrown back, gazing unbroken at the golden wonder of it all.

Next: Not So Modern Art