50ccPilgrim.uk

Rosslyn Chapel, just south of Edinburgh. A late medieval chapel made famous by Dan Brown's ridiculous Da Vinci Code , it's also a place that was repeatedly and highly recommended to me by my daughter and son in law. So I called in today to discover they were absolutely right: Rosslyn is a must.  Construction started on this incredible structure in the 1440s, and as far as I could tell by looking around the owner of the Roslin estate, William St Clair, employed half the master stonemasons in Europe and told them to do as they pleased. The sculptured interior is amazing, edifying (he'd set out to create "a Bible in stone"), inspiring and, yes, beautiful.  After a magnificent storytelling introduction by our guide, Helen, we visitors were given free rein to wander as we pleased. It was captivating, and more than an hour flew by without my even noticing - despite this being really rather small by church standards. It had originally been envisaged as a huge...

I mentioned Giotto's remarkable crucifix in a previous post; it hangs right in the middle of the nave at the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella. This isn't a photo of it (my phone camera isn't good enough to get a decent one). It's a photo of a 10 cent prayer card I bought on the way out. Not quite as good, but the earlier post shows it in it's proper setting, so go take another look. For me, one of the striking elements was the combination of blood and skull at the bottom of the crucifix: Now that might seem grisly, but stay with me here. There's some symbolic imagery at work. In the Bible we read that Christ was crucified at Golgotha, meaning the 'place of the skull'. Medieval Christians understood that to me the exact place at which Adam had died and been buried - it wasn't just the place of a  skull, but the place of the  skull. In Giotto's painting the blood flowing from Christ is running down the mountainside and is abo...