Look Up!

Yesterday, I was out for a walk with my love and our wildly cute, fiercely independent Scottish Terrier, Monte, who struts through our adopted home of Florence like she owns the place, collecting every “bellina!” thrown her way like it’s her royal due. She’s small, but she’s got presence. More than most people, honestly.

We passed through Piazza della Signoria, the beating heart of Florence. There, in the middle of the Piazza, stands a 3.6-metre sculpture by British artist Thomas J Price.

A girl, staring down at her phone. Life-size times ten. Back turned to everything. The Uffizi. The Loggia dei Lanzi. The Palazzo Vecchio. To Venus, to Medusa, to David.

She’s part fiction, part technology, part traditional craft — but she’s very real. She’s us.

Everywhere I looked, the irony played out in real-time. People standing right in front of masterpieces — heads down, scrolling. Lining up for selfies, but never stepping inside the Uffizi. Taking photos of themselves with buildings they’ll never learn the names of.

I’ve been documenting this for a while now (with my Nikon, not my phone), my eye, and a growing frustration. The world is right here. Alive. Glorious. And people are missing it.

At lunch yesterday, the woman next to us was playing solitaire on her phone while her boyfriend sat in silence. At dinner a few months back, the guy at the next table was swiping through Tinder. I could see the screen clearly — tables are close in Europe — while his mother, visiting from the U.S., tried to have a real conversation.

It seems most locals hate the statue. Almost as much as they hate the thousands of people eating massive Instagram-famous sandwiches on the steps of their cathedrals, totally unaware of the level of disrespect they are showing to the people of this city, completely checked out, face in phone, sandwich in hand, crumbs on stone that’s older than some countries.

This is a city built by the hands of giants. Not metaphorical giants — real ones.

Michelangelo carved his David just a few steps from here, chiselling defiance into marble that still dares you to look away. Leonardo da Vinci walked these same cobblestones, sketching the future while studying the flight of birds. Botticelli gave us The Birth of Venus — a goddess emerging from the sea with grace so eternal it still quiets rooms centuries later. Brunelleschi raised the Duomo’s dome against every architectural odd and made the impossible stand. Dante reshaped language. Galileo redefined the stars. Machiavelli changed politics forever — right here in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio.

And now? People come all this way to sit on cathedral steps, scrolling TikToks about places they don’t bother to look at. They don’t see the stories, the struggle, the staggering beauty created by minds that cracked open the world because their heads are buried in screens, chasing digital dopamine instead of wonder.

That sculpture? Temporary. Maybe it’ll be gone in a month. But what it reflects is a crisis that’s already rooted deep.

We’re not just looking down. We’re checking out. From each other. From the moment. From meaning. From the kind of beauty that used to demand reverence.

And here’s what we’re forgetting, as Laith and I discussed yesterday...... boredom is essential. Boredom is the quiet room where creativity shows up. It’s the pause that gives space for an idea to land, a memory to rise, or a question to take shape. Without boredom, there is no depth. Just noise. The great artists and thinkers who walked these streets before us? they were bored sometimes. They stared at the ceilings. They wandered. They waited. And in that stillness, brilliance emerged. We’ve lost that. We fear boredom now like it’s a failure instead of recognising it as the birthplace of imagination. We’re scrolling past our own lives.

We need to look up. Not just for art. For context. For connection. For a shot at waking up to what it means to be alive.

Monte, at least, gets it. She struts through Florence like a queen who knows the weight of her kingdom. Tail up, ears perked, fully present. No screen, no feed. Just the world, in all its messy, magnificent realness.

Maybe we should follow her lead.

Because while you're chasing likes, life....real life.....is walking right past you. Tail high. Nose in the air. And not waiting for you to catch up.