Bologna - Firenze (85 miles)

Marmirolo, was that yesterday morning?

Now you're just somebody that I used to know.

So here I am, halfway through an odyssey of beauty and the aesthetic wonders just keep on coming.

Florence is mind blowing, truly, and I fear I may be never be able to leave. As I stepped into the Duomo Square, Tuscan countryside lingering pleasantly in my thoughts, the Renaissance hit me with a sculpted marble mallet.

What the...

How...

What the fuck?

Brunelleschi's unbelievable cathedral was so immense, so ridiculous, that I wasn't sure what to do. I hard never seen a design like it. Its a place of worship, it shouldn't be so liberal, playful, sexual, staggeringly beautiful. What do I do? What do I feel?

I have experienced this kind of intensity only two of three other times, most recently stepping into Times Square at night, and the sensory overload, the sheer audacity of the visual experience renders you almost helpless. In the former it was a multitude of colour and light, here it is pure, relentless beauty at ever corner. In the Baroque universe this is the Big Bang. It is enough to make you scream.

However, the most amazing cathedral on the planet is just the beginning. Walk another 100 yards and there is Michaelangelo David, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Santa Maria Novella with Masaccio's Trinity. It is classic art's Manhattan, and instead of looking up you can only to walk around and let the beauty sink into you soul. I cycle of course, because in my heaven everyone rides a bike, and let my soul float through utopia.

Where did all this go? Why did we stop making our cities like this? Why did we stop believing in heaven?

I wonder whether in a secular universe, if anything like this will be possible again. Art, in this design, was an expression of the divine in human form, and it required this creative mindset. To create utopia you had to believe in it.

Very few of the people staring and taking photos believe in anything at all. They take put away their cameras, go for a drink and feel happy with their lot. I doubt they will create anything comparable and I doubt they care if they do or they don't. To not believe in anything makes you believe in only yourself. I've tried it. It's not right. There is more out there and if you want to find out you have to have belief. I pity those who do not, because as much as they may think they are right – it restricts their world view so much. You might think you know a great deal but how are you going to express it? In a blog? On Facebook? In a manual? You need the means but you also need an end.

So in the 20^th Century we've had Picasso and Mondrian and Rothko, and there is beauty in their secular vision, but they do not make you feel like Masaccio or Rafael does. It takes something of the divine to represent beauty like they do and, right or wrong, the experience is far greater for its presence. Its absence may go a long way to explain the turmoil of the modern human condition.

On adventures like these, in place such as this, I do believe in something more. I don’t think this is proof of the existence of a God but I do not have these need for validation. I see beautiful human design and beautiful natural design it takes me to a different place. What that is I am not certain. I don’t define it or rationalise it because that is to render it ugly. I feel it and embrace it and live Bellisimo instead.

I guess this is what I want to say Mr Dawkins. Without the concept of a God what would happen to all of this? Florence would made up of skyscrapers and Burger Kings and traffic lights. We would walk around looking at the pavement and feel smug by how certain it all of is. Beauty would have straight lines.

Thank God for the divine. Nothing says 'You can do it' quite like belief no matter how irrational it may seem - I've needed a few times over the last week. Weigh things up rationally and you will not achieve anywhere near as much.

Perhaps that was the problem, I'd become so certain about so many things that I'd lost the belief in something more.

In Firenze it is impossible to feel anything else.