What a setting!

Well, my talk was nothing special -- although it was an excellent audience of hospital presidents, medical directors, and clinical risk managers from two or three dozen regionally run public hospitals in Tuscany. Officially, this wasn't a business trip: I had taken some vacation time and volunteered to help teach a city planning class for some MIT students here in Florence. But, it turns out that our ED has been involved for several years in training emergency room physicians here, and they nabbed me to do a lecture. It was the usual topic, "Managing change in hospitals to improve quality and safety of patient care."

But the setting was a former Medici villa, now called Villa La Quiete, which has been handed down over the centuries to the local university. And after the talk, they gave a private tour of some of the back rooms for me and a couple lucky MIT students and their instructor. Hiding away was a Botticelli entitled, "Incoronazione della Vergine e Sante", from about 1500. I took the pictures above (don't worry, no flash!) to give you a sense of some of the images in the painting. It took your breath away to be this close to such a masterpiece.