The story
It started with my grandfather.
My grandfather was a history-of-art professor. He never turned me into an art historian, and I never studied it or made a career of it. What he gave me was smaller than that and has lasted far longer: a way of looking. A handful of paintings I can still place room by room. Particular drawings. Particular museums. Small things that, years on, are really how I remember him.
The first of those small things he ever gave me was a stone. He told me about a spot hidden in the pavement of St Peter's Square in Rome where, if you stand in exactly the right place, four rows of columns line up into one. No picture, just his words. The first time I went to Rome, as a child, it was the first thing I looked for, and it was there, and it worked. I wrote the whole story here.
He instilled the love young. That is the part I wanted to pass on.
Years later I took my two children on their first trip abroad together, the kind where you spend real time inside museums rather than rushing past them. I love these rooms, and I love taking my time in them. But I also carry the guilt every parent knows now, the screens and their constant pull, and I wanted the galleries to be the antidote rather than one more thing to endure until the children asked to leave.
So I went looking for something to hand them at the Louvre. All I could find were flat, one-page checklists. My son loves a treasure hunt, and children need to earn something for what they do. So I made one myself. A friend who saw it told me to sell it, and the first time a stranger bought one felt like an electric shock.
Every booklet since comes from the same place. The love my grandfather handed me, passed on to my children, and now, maybe, to yours.
Federica, The Gentle Parent