What with school and homework, we did very little by way of museums and sights in our first two weeks. But today it begins! After a simple brekkies at our hotel, we walked through the park to reach The Fine Arts Museum. Oh wow. (Already revisiting our perpetual travel need for more superlatives.)

We started in the lower floor with the medieval stuff, thinking we’d give it a quick look before moving on to the Renaissance and upstairs to the 18th and 19th centuries. Little did we know how captivating their collection of altar pieces would be.

The scale of the altar pieces were incredible, but the details in the paintings really drew us in, especially the sly bits of humor in various expressions.

We had just moved on to the Early Renaissance – “Hey, everyone, I’ve discovered perspective!” –

… and encountered Botticelli’s  portrait of Mark Rylance in Wolf Hall –

(OK, I thought the resemblance was extraordinary, but possibly it was some Greek dude called Michele Tarcaiota) when…crash.