Little did I know what would come next.

Firstly and most importantly, you could talk endlessly about the charm of Rome as many prominent scientists and artists have done before. And yet, only when you arrive there will you realize what is this all about. On the one hand, Rome is without any doubt the Spiritual Center of the Christian World. It seems to me that even the sun shines more brightly there than anywhere else. On the other hand, Rome has some dark pages in its divine history. It is hard to believe, but before Constantine the Great made the Roman Empire Christian in 313 A.D. Christians were arrested and tortured at the Colosseum.

Secondly, it is extraordinary that, despite all the obstacles, they did manage to preserve the achievements of the past till the present day. Rome is like a multi-storey building and it has its foundation – Antiquity. What I am trying to say is that the Whole History of Art lies in front of you, right under your feet – literally speaking. All you need to do is walk along the curvy streets of the city and look around.

Last but not least, the influence of the Roman Culture has been so huge that one can find a lot of replicas of Italian Architecture in many other countries. I presume, there are two main ways of studying the History of Art. The first one is the shortest and the hardest – you may start from the beginning and go to Rome. Or you could travel around Europe trying to put the puzzle – “pieces of Rome” – together.

To sum it up, it was love from the first sight. I will never forget the ringing of the bells of Santa Maria Maggiore at 9 P.M. If you ask me, I am virtually certain that this Mysterious Sound really is the Essence of the Roman Spirit.

It is undeniable that Ancient Philosophy has had a tremendous impact on Western Culture. Since Socrates, Plato and Aristotle lived before Christianity and could not enter Paradise, Dante had nothing to do but put them in Limbo, which is the first circle of Inferno in “The Divine Comedy”. And even there they were having a perpetual seminar and discussing their works with each other.

Some may argue that Ancient Philosophers were not always right (for example, Ptolemy’s Geocentric model of the Universe has become obsolete), but the fact that they were trying to find out the First Principle of All Things – or Arche – is awesome.

It is no wonder that artists tend to insert “quotations” from Ancient sources in their paintings. Let us have a look, for example, at “The Spinners” by Diego Vel'azquez where he combines two subjects – one from Classical Mythology and the other from the era in which he lives. That is to say, in the background we can see Jupiter’s Rape of Europa waved by Arachne who was turned into a spider by Minerva since she could not find any flaws in Arachne’s carpet. While in the foreground there are real women from Vel'azquez’s time involved in tapestry manufacturing.

There is the Crown Fountain in the Summer Gardens in Saint Petersburg surrounded by busts of Ancient Philosophers – Diogenes, Heraclitus, Democritus, Aristotle, etc. So that people wandering around in search for some shade could stop for a moment and admire their dedication and commitment in the pursuit of knowledge. Surprisingly enough, Ancient method of “thinking while walking” has not lost its effectiveness nowadays. I practice it all the time especially when writing an article or a book since it helps me to concentrate and organize my thoughts.

In the famous “Allegory of the Cave” Socrates tells us about prisoners who live under the earth and can see nothing but shadows projected on the wall from objects being carried along in front of a fire. What I am trying to say is that in order to gain freedom we need to break the chains and walk towards the Light. It may hurt our eyes at first, but we will get used to it in the end.

Pre-Socratic philosophers were asking questions about the nature of things. And their answers were really amazing, for example, the qualitative monism of the Milesians who believed that everything could be reduced to, derived from one or several elements (water – Thales; air – Anaximenes; fire – Heraclitus; water, air, fire, earth – Anaximander, etc.). According to the double-aspect theory of Pythagoras and Heraclitus, everything is in the process of change and, at the same time, everything is in order which, by the way, could be of different kinds – mathematical order (Pythagoras) or Logos (Heraclitus). Moreover, there was the absolute monism of the Eleatics, the pluralism of Democritus (Mechanism) and Anaxagoras (Teleology), etc. In other words, Pre-Socratics were formulating the philosophical agenda that Western Philosophy has worked with ever since.

While the Sophists were skeptical of the possibility of knowing the truth about reality and turned from the pursuit of knowledge to the practice of Rhetoric trying to persuade people by non-logical means, Socrates, on the contrary, was interested in the cultivation of souls and developed his own method of achieving this result which was called Dialectic. The way in which Dialectic uncovers the truth is very much like the way in which we recollect something. And the object of knowledge is not the world of Particulars (the world of time and change), but rather the reality of Forms, the first patterns that everything else follows.

In “The Symposium” Plato suggests that since Forms are universal an unchangeable and Particulars are always changing and temporal, we should distinguish between the essence of the Ideal Beauty which could be grasped only “with the eye of the mind” and particular beautiful things. We should “begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is”.