The first time I ever thought about visiting this city, I almost didn’t. I was in the middle of a lengthy tour through Europe with my wife, 14-year old daughter, and 10-year old son. We were spending 10 weeks in Italy and joining up with renowned watercolorist, Wyatt Waters, to work on a new coffee table cookbook.

Waters’ main artistic influence had been John Singer Sargent. I knew Sargent from his Gilded Age portraiture of the Vanderbilts and the like, and I had seen his most famous painting, Madame X which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.