The Shock of the Old is the intellectual outlet of a housewife with a Ph.D. I didn't begin it that way; if you read some of my earliest posts, you'll notice that I started with a different mindset. But after a couple of years of living unemployed in a small southern Italian town, and a year into being a stay-at-home mom, I began to notice a vague, unpleasant sensation in my head. It wasn't until I woke one morning with the realization that I would always be an art historian even if I never taught again, that I understood that the unpleasant feeling was my intellect dying. And immediately I knew why: I'd been keeping myself from doing one of the things that I love best in the world, writing about art, for too long and for no good reason.

I then decided that, in the absence of a research library and vast stretches of uninterrupted time to devote to a significant project, this blog could be a worthwhile temporary substitute for the intellectual life I left behind when I moved to Italy. And I began to post more often about art and architecture. If you find that personal posts interspersed with art historical ones make for a strange or artificial admixture, keep in mind that to me the combination of the two is completely natural. My intellectual development as an art historian has so conditioned how I experience the world that it would be artificial for me not to write about art when writing about my life. In fact, it is only now that I feel that this blog is truly indicative of who I am. The Shock of the Old remains an expat's chronicle of a small corner of the world, but that corner is now seen squarely through the eyes of an art historian.