Michelangelo ran and hid from Pope Julius II. "Please Pope, don't make me paint that icky ceiling!" But Julius was so annoyed at Michelangelo's insolience that not only did he have him tracked down, but he also went to war with Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, and France!

Michelangelo wasn't even that hard to find, he just ran back home to Florence. And after Julius took over Bologna he made Michelangelo work in Bronze to make a huge ass sculpture of Julius to set up on the porch of the church of San Petronio in Bologna to loom over those rebellious sod's and remind them of who was boss!

And so Michelangelo had to spend a bit over a year casting a 10,000 pound and fourteen foot tall statue. One of the largest bronze statues since ye olden dayes.

In an amusing footnote, the statue was melted down less then five years later in order to make a BIG ASS GUN to use to come after Pope Julius, who, meantime, had broken papel law and GROWN A BEARD!

And personal hygiene? Forget about it! Michalengelo would sleep in his boots, and "...he has sometimes gone so long without taking them off that then the skin came away like a snake's with the boots."

And, oh yes, somewhere in all of this excitement, a ceiling was painted.

I desperately need to find, adopt, or create a method for adding geospatial annotations to books. The book is dense with locations. Individual paragraphs will have seven, or more, spatial references. Then there are the issues of temporal references. What came first, and last, and in between, and who the heck is everyone...

But location is the first step. The book starts out 'The Piazza Rusticucci was not one of Rome's most prestigous addresses. Though only a short walk from the Vatican, the square was humble and nondescript, part of a maze of narror streets and densely packed shops and houses that ran west from where the Ponte Sant'Angelo crossed the Tiber River.'

If one is in on the code that sentence is immensly evocative. You know much about this place based only on that description. And if you are out of loop you get the idea that it is a downscale place near a river and near the Vatican.

2004-12-13