Nina d'Alessandro

I took this photo in Florence, Italy, in October. The view is of the Basilica of Santo Spirito, on the Oltrarno. I'm teaching here this year. I looked up from reading my students' essays at my desk one late afternoon, and the sky at sunset was doing something breathtaking. I caught the way I feel living here surrounded by all this beauty: a sense of grace, good fortune, and luminous joy that's just a little tinged with sadness, knowing that, as Robert Frost wrote, "nothing gold can stay", that I won't live here forever, and that I'll be going back to New York City, a grayer, bluer place where the light is increasingly blocked by constant high rise construction, and a sense of history is lost or denied. In the dark bottom section of this picture, the rooftops and windows that spill out between my apartment and my favorite church, designed by Brunelleschi nearly six hundred years ago, are all there. I worked hard for this shot, and I have been working to learn my iPhone 4s, the way the lens curves, the pecularities of the light meter . . . I find myself using the smartphone camera wherever I go now, feeling blessed and feeling joy every single day. I think we are meant to live like this . . .