The Places I Never Expect to Find

Italy is hiding a secret. You just have to know which doors to open.

And I don’t mean the famous sites—the ones you already know are going to be spectacular.

I mean the small churches you stumble across, peppered throughout Italy. The ones you might walk right past without ever realizing what’s hiding behind their doors.

You’re wandering down a narrow street, maybe looking for somewhere to eat, and there’s an old wooden door cracked open. No line. No ticket. Sometimes not even another person inside.

You step through it, and suddenly the outside world disappears.

Your eyes have to adjust to the darkness before you begin to see what’s around you. Then, little by little, the church reveals itself.

Stained glass glowing above you. Marble beneath your feet. Paintings stretching across walls and ceilings. Gold tucked into carvings so intricate you wonder how anyone’s hands could have possibly made them. Tiny faces, flowers, angels, columns, patterns and details layered upon details—some of them so high above the floor that the person who created them probably knew most people would never even see them clearly.

And yet they made them beautiful anyway.

That’s the part that gets me.

These weren’t projects measured in months. Some took decades. Some took generations. An artist could spend a huge portion of his life working on something he might never see completed.

Every brushstroke, every piece of glass, every carved piece of stone feels like a message sent forward through time.

I was here. I believed this mattered.

Standing there hundreds of years later, somehow it still does.

These churches feel like time capsules you’re allowed to walk inside. When they’re quiet enough, there’s almost a presence to them. You can imagine the mumbling prayers and footsteps of all the people who stood in that exact place before you—weddings, funerals, celebrations, fear, gratitude, grief and hope passing through the same doors for centuries.

I don't know that you have to be religious to feel something in these places. I think even an agnostic can stand beneath a ceiling painted by hand centuries ago, surrounded by an almost impossible amount of beauty and devotion, and wonder if maybe there is something bigger than us.

Maybe that was part of the message all along.

Italy’s churches don't just preserve religion.

They preserve what human beings are capable of creating when they believe something is worth leaving behind.

The photos in this story were taken inside Santissimo Salvatore in Bologna—a church I stumbled into while wandering the city, and a perfect example of the hidden beauty waiting behind Italy’s doors.

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