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As you enter St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, you won’t miss Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the Pietà, sculpted in 1499-1500. Your private guide of A La Carte Italy Tours, a company offering private limousine tours across Italy, will tell you the story of that sculpture.

Michaelangelo went to the Eternal City in June, 1496. He was still young, only twenty-one. It was the first step in his actual life. One of his first works there, La Pieta, executed for Cardinal St. Denis, the French ambassador at Rome, who desired to leave some monument of himself in the great city, made Michelangelo famous.

None before Michelangelo would have thought of this: the more often the work is contemplated, the more touching does its beauty become, everywhere the purest nature, in harmony both in spirit and exterior. Michelangelo numbered twenty-four years when he had finished his Pieta.

How could Michael Angelo have carved this work at twenty-four ? His knowledge of anatomy was surprising. But, above all, he was in love with art. He said once, explaining why he had not married: “I have only too much of a wife in my art, and she has given me trouble enough. As to my children, they are the works that I shall leave; and if they are not worth much, they will at least live for some time.”

When some person criticised the youthful appearance of the Virgin, and captiously asked where a mother could be found, like this one, younger than her son, the painter answered: “In Paradise”.

Upon Michelangelo’s return to Florence, Cardinal Piccolomini, later Pius III, made a contract with him for fifteen statues of Carrara marble to embellish the family chapel in the cathedral of Siena. Three years were allowed for this work. The artist finished but four statues, Peter, Paul, Gregory, and Pius, because of other labors which were pressed upon him.

Michael Angelo was then willing to undertake the making of another statue. He was allowed two years in which to complete it, with a monthly salary of six gold florins. His only preparation for the work was a little wax model which he moulded, now in the Uffizi. He worked untiringly, so that he often slept with his clothes on, to be ready for his beloved statue as soon as the morning dawned. He had shut himself away from the public gaze by planks and masonry, and worked alone, not intrusting a stroke to other hands. He was convinced that we must keep our head in solitude. Great thoughts are not born usually in the whirl of social life.

Finally, when the statue was finished in January, 1504, and the colossal David stood unveiled before the people, they said: “It is as great a miracle as if a dead body had been raised to life.” Michelangelo intended, by this work, to teach the Florentines that as David “had defended his people and governed justly, so they who were then ruling that city should defend it with courage and govern it uprightly.”

The statue of David weighed eighteen thousand pounds, and required forty men four days to drag it by ropes a quarter of a mile to the place where it was to stand in the Piazza della Signoria. Notwithstanding that the praise of the sculptor was on every lip, still there was so much jealousy among the artists that some of their followers threw stones at the statue during the nights when it was being carried to the Piazza, and eight persons were arrested and put in prison.

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A La Carte Italy Tours offer private escorted tours with expert driver-guides in all areas of Italy. Their website contains several information pages about UNESCO heritage sites in Italy.