The plane and the train...
Outside the Basilica di Santa Croce, source of the Stendhal
syndrome: When 19th-century French author Stendhal visited the Basilica, where
Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo
are buried, he saw Giotto's ceiling frescoes for the first time and was
overcome with emotion. He wrote "I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea
of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed
in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one
encounters celestial sensations... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah,
if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they
call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of
falling." Although there are many descriptions of people becoming dizzy
and fainting while taking in Florentine art, especially at the Uffizi, dating
from the early 19th century on, the syndrome was only named in 1979, when it
was described by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed and
described more than 100 similar cases among tourists and visitors in Florence.
Oceanus Fountain l'Isolotto at the Boboli Gardens (Giardini di Boboli)
behind the Pitti Palace, the main seat of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany at
Florence, laid out for Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de' Medici.
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