Stuck at Home, Let's Enjoy the Spring (by Botticelli)

Daily pills to help students (and families) organize their study in Covid-19 times, when almost one billion children have seen their schools close. Signed by Marcello Bramati and Lorenzo Sanna, deans and teachers at Faes high schools in Milan. As reported by Time magazine, they are teaching online during the lockdown, in an ongoing experiment in remote learning. Every morning at 8.30 a.m., their advice, tips and good practices for students of all ages.

Children and teenagers of all ages have been confined by coronavirus in the narrow walls of their homes for days now, stuck in their bedrooms. Kids lack airtime, we can't deny it. It's forbidden any kind of outdoor activity, such as museums, play spaces and sports lessons.

Children miss travels, but they also lack simple walks where they can enjoy the outdoor without worries. There is no community life, no city with its many social opportunities, no mountains, no sea...

In this moment, however, we have the duty not to get down and to raise again, always and in any case, trying to take different roads from the usual ones.

In these difficult days some teachers are sharing with their classes the links to virtual tours of the most important Italian and European museums, up to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It's an excellent idea and a practice not to be underestimated. So, let's take our computers and tablets, the whole family together, and discover art.

Shall we take a walk today? Sure, through technology we can go beyond the suspended time, the increasingly closed borders of our countries and the increasingly narrow walls of our rooms. Let's take a walk on the virtual paths of museums, accompanying children and students in the rooms of the Louvre and Hermitage, Prado or Vatican Museums.

Let's discover epic battles against lions in the Assyrian bas-reliefs of the British Museum, among the great myths of antiquity. Let's find out how antiquity heroes look like in the ceramics of the Archaeological Museum of Athens, or let's enjoy together the Spring, the painting of Sandro Botticelli, in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The time will come when we will go out together again and will take a flight for an extraordinary journey. In the meantime let's take notes, look for ideas and be enchanted by beauty, even from a distance. In these strange circumstances, the next trip could be just the hunt for a museum.