Thanks! Missed it. I will enter it in my book. Love Michaelangelo and Leonardo! Two amazing and talented men.

Can you imagine life in 1512? Columbus has just sailed across the Atlantic 20 years ago.

I can mostly just imagine the smell

Ah yes, are we smelling the market place with fresh baked rye bread, the newly smoked hams, and myriad spices?

more like the miasma of a mostly unwashed populace

Great word Phee, "miasma". That effluvium stuff takes me more into the Dark Ages though, 400 AD to 1000 AD. (Or is that the Early Middle Ages?)

my next favorite word is ennui. I think they still smelled in the 16th century, they just had better perfumes to try to cover it up with

ennui sounds French. Maybe unfairly, but I think of France when it comes to old stinky, rat and disease infested cities, with pungeant odors, flower carts and wine barrels rolling down the cobblestone.

yeah I hear the rats even cook there

We could remy that. Wonder it that had two e's.