there were just some things that you'd never forget. For me, one of them was when I was

18 years old and on a student trip down to Boston from my school in Maine. My art teacher was

taking us just a handful of art-loving students on a private trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

My mother, who was from a long line of Bostonians, made sure I went on this particular trip.

You won't believe it, is all she said as she dropped me off to wait to be picked up by the van.

After navigating midday Boston traffic, we arrived at the Gardner Museum,

tucked along the marshy Fenway behind Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Standing outside in front of the building, I was a bit unimpressed in that 18-year-old way.

What stood before me were great, tall,

stone-colored, nearly unadorned without any decoration, rising above me to create a boxy, subdued,

seemingly unremarkable mass. This is a Venetian palace, I thought. Entering the museum and proceeding

through a few small first floor galleries, I clutched the wristrap of my 1970s instimatic camera

with the requisite bag of flash cubes, which of course, needless to say, went unused that day. As I wandered,

half listening to my teacher, but with a growing fascination with the eclectic objects I was seeing,

I really wasn't sure what was next. And I certainly wasn't prepared for it when it arrived. Turning into a dark,

cloister-like hall as the bright noonday sun cast shadows on the columns on my left and flooded my path

with light, I saw it. At the center of the museum is the great courtyard, a soaring four-story space in almost pinkish stone rising toward the sky.

Covered by a glass ceiling and as they ascended, these almost rose-colored walls were punctuated with arches and balconies and windows from the Venetian Renaissance.

All around were plants and trees from palms to grasses to flowering orchids bordering an intricately laid Roman marble mosaic floor with an image of Medusa at its center.

The Medusa mosaic was accented at its corners by towering columns also from

the ancient world. It all comes on you as a surprise and you gasp as if you have discovered

the rarest and most beautiful flower that blooms only once a year. It's impossible to look away. And even today, after having

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