You can consider this photo to be the beginning of the Italy photos. This is a shot that I took in the Vatican museums. It's a Greek sculpture that I have always loved. The full sculpture is of Laocoon and his two sons wrestling with a serpent. It's dated from the 1st Century AD, but was found by the Italians in 1510, just in time for Michaelangelo and his peers to learn massive amounts from it about how to correctly represent movement. From what I remember from my art history classes, there is a marked difference between art in Italy before the Laocoon Group was found and after.
Here's a link to the full sculpture
