On 22 April 1932 Maurits Escher leaves for Italy, together with his friend and painter Giuseppe Haas-Triverio. Their destination: Sicily. In the square in front of the church in Gangi a couple of street urchins ask them if they would like to see some dead priests.

Birds are a regularly recurring subject in Escher’s work, mostly in one of his many tessellations. Sun and Moon, a woodcut from April 1948, is one of them. But there is something special about this one.

Around 1946 Escher became fascinated by mathematical spatial figures. He was captivated by the regularity and necessity of these shapes, which are mysterious and quite unfathomable to humans. He was stimulated in this by his brother, geologist and professor Berend George Escher, who gave him a copy of his standard work 'Algemene Mineralogie en Kristallographie' (1935). Escher drew on this fascination to create both very small worlds (crystals) and very large ones (stars and planets). One of the most beautiful planets is Tetrahedral Planetoid, from April 1954.

In the months of April to June 1922, Escher makes a trip to Italy, followed by a journey to Spain by cargo boat in the autumn. His hunger for travel remains yet unsatisfied, and in November he visits Italy for a second time. First Genoa and Pisa and on 15 November he is back in Siena. He is delighted by the light blue sky over the hills of Tuscany. He is happy.

Maurits Escher has visited Italy several times before, but when he boards the train to Florence on 5 April 1922 things are a bit different. Where he used to travel with his parents, he is now accompanied by his friends Jan van der Does de Willebois, Bas Kist and Jan's sister Alexandra (Lex).

In April 1980 Douglas R. Hofstadter wins the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The main chapters alternate with dialogues between imaginary characters. The book contains many instances of recursion and self-reference and is full of wordplay and puzzles. It's a very ambitious book that doesn't succeed on all levels, but Hofstadter's optimism and his drive to explore the huge amounts of knowledge available in the world make that you want to read it again and again.

Convex and Concave (March 1955) has a nightmarish quality: where is the entrance, are we going up or down, are we inside or outside? The construction in the middle, where two perspectives merge, produces a sensation of dizziness.

During the first months of 1934 Escher worked on a series of prints of Rome by night.

‘This amazing, beautiful, night-time Rome, whose architecture I love so much more than I do during the day’.

In the winter of 1925/1926 Escher worked on a series of six woodcuts about the creation of the world as told in the Book of Genesis, ‘I sei giorni della creazione’. The series gathered a lot of appreciation, both in the Netherlands as in Italy where he exhibited them in…

Escher produced a number of prints based on the concept of the Möbius strip, discovered by the German mathematician and astronomer Ferdinand Möbius (1790-1868).