The number of rooms you cover tells you very little about what you took from them.
THE LETTER
Dear First name / friend,
More familiar Irish weather has rolled back in over the past couple of weeks and, as I write this, the view from my window is decidedly grey. There is still plenty of green outside, but it will not be very long now before the trees begin to empty and my rather leafy outlook becomes a good deal more sparse for the winter.
I am ready for it, I think. I love the changing of the seasons, and that we get four distinct ones in Ireland keeps the year moving along in a way I would miss enormously.
I did almost reach for a pair of boots instead of my trainers the other day, before stepping outside and remembering that, despite all the wind and bluster, it is still actually very mild.
Pippo is rather less enthusiastic about recent developments. Having spent almost all of his nearly 6 months on earth growing up during an unusually hot, dry Irish summer, he has now decided that going to the toilet on wet grass is an indignity he would prefer not to endure.
Holding everything in until there is a suitable carpet available indoors apparently presents the better option, so wet-weather surveillance of a small dachshund has become one of my less glamorous September occupations.
Most of my own time has otherwise been spent at home with my head down in the backend of Cultured Voyages, working my way through the existing archive and gradually updating parts of the site itself. The Edit has been pulled apart and put back together along the way.
You will probably already have noticed the result.
I wanted these letters to feel more like the publication I have gradually been building Cultured Voyages into, with more room for my photography to sit alongside the words, one destination worth bringing back to your attention and a small number of useful things that have earned their place.
The Letter itself remains at the centre of it all; I like to think that I have merely given it a better home.
The museum that I did not finish
By the time we reached the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, dusk was beginning to fall, staining the sky that deep, inky blue that appears for a short while before night takes over, while the lights of the city came to life around us.
It was later than was ideal.
Having already spent hours walking around Naples, I entered with tired legs, a rumbling stomach and a considerable underestimation of just how much museum was waiting inside.
I particularly wanted to see two things: the Farnese Collection and the objects excavated from Pompeii.
I saw both.
Had I left then, I would have left having seen exactly what had drawn me there in the first place. Instead, I carried on and, somewhere in the rooms that followed, the character of the visit began to change.
I was looking less closely, walking more quickly and consulting the map far more often than I would have liked.
What had started as curiosity was turning into an urge to account for what remained.
When the museum map starts keeping the score
I can remember the same feeling taking hold in another museum somewhere in Italy, although I cannot for the life of me remember which one it was.
What I remember much more clearly is its map.
The galleries were marked with Roman numerals and, having somehow emerged from room III into room VII, I became preoccupied by IV, V and VI.
I would find myself retracing my route or peering at the plan trying to work out which turn I had missed, increasingly concerned by the rooms that appeared to have escaped me altogether.
The map had stopped helping me find my way and started keeping score.
A museum map can make a visit look unusually measurable. Once every gallery has a number and the route sits neatly in front of you on a page, everything you have not seen becomes visible too - and therefore strangely easy to regard as something that still needs to be accounted for.
There is the ticket you have paid for as well, the possibility that you may never return and the cultural weight carried by a famous institution, where walking away with entire rooms unseen can begin to feel less like exercising judgement and more like failing to finish the assignment.
For a long time, I think I attached rather more meaning to that completeness than it deserved.
I was genuinely interested in art, history and archaeology, but somewhere within that interest sat a misplaced belief that taking culture seriously meant knowing as much as possible about everything.
Seeing every room and reading as much as I could became wrapped up in proving - perhaps largely to myself - that my interest was genuine.
Nobody knows everything.
Nor does reaching the final gallery tell you whether you understood, noticed or felt very much along the way. It tells you that you reached the final gallery.
The morning I did not watch the clock
There have been plenty of museums, meanwhile, where leaving early never entered my head.
At the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, I became absorbed in the paintings for the better part of a morning. I remember Albrecht Dürer’s extraordinary self-portrait particularly well, along with the rooms of Dutch painting where the enormous Rembrandts kept stopping me in my tracks.
I was not trying to remain there for a suitably cultured amount of time.
I had merely lost track of it.
That distinction matters, because none of this is an argument for making museum visits shorter. Some museums can hold me for hours, while unfamiliar art sometimes needs patience before it begins to give anything back.
Following what interests you does not mean turning around the moment something fails to entertain you.
There is, however, a point at which giving something proper attention becomes continuing because you feel that you ought to.
The number of minutes involved tells us remarkably little.
Forty attentive ones may leave a deeper impression than three dutiful hours in which the contents of one gallery have long since begun to merge with the next; equally, if something continues to hold you for an entire morning, there is no virtue in leaving merely because somebody has decided that 90 minutes ought to be sufficient.
Time should follow the engagement rather than determine whether the visit was a successful one.
Cultural curiosity does not require completeness
Back in Naples, somewhere between the tired legs, the empty stomach and the growing awareness that I was now moving through rooms for the sake of being able to say that I had moved through them, the absurdity of it finally caught up with me.
What was I running around for?
I had seen the Farnese Collection and the objects from Pompeii that I had particularly wanted to see. Continuing through increasingly indistinct rooms was not going to make those things more meaningful, nor would covering another floor make my interest in archaeology any more legitimate.
So I left.
That moment has stayed with me because I think I had spent years confusing completeness with seriousness.
Cultural curiosity is necessarily selective. I can stand transfixed in front of Renaissance paintings or Roman sculpture and then move much more quickly through a room that another visitor might spend an hour examining; that person may then walk straight past something that would stop me completely.
Neither of us has failed at the museum.
And that, perhaps, is the useful thing to remember the next time you find yourself studying the map more intently than whatever is hanging on the wall in front of you.
I would not take it as an automatic instruction to leave, but I would take it as a reason to notice what is now driving the visit.
If you are still interested, stay.
If something unfamiliar has not opened itself up to you yet, give it a little time.
But if the main satisfaction left is the prospect of being able to say that you covered the lot, I am no longer convinced that reaching the final room adds very much.
I remember the Farnese sculptures and the objects brought out of Pompeii.
I do not remember the rooms I failed to find.
That is all from me for this fortnight.
I hope you enjoy finding your way around this new incarnation of The Edit.
I have spent a somewhat unreasonable amount of time nudging photographs, type and margins backwards and forwards - happily, I should add, because design and photography have always felt as much a part of Cultured Voyages to me as the words do.
There will be more changes appearing across the site over the coming months too, along with rather more new writing once I emerge from the second half of my great 180-post refresh.
*** Affiliate note: Some links in this email may be affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you book or buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only include resources I genuinely use, rate or would recommend.
