It's difficult to arrive at specificity when you are one among thousands who are witnessing the exact same spectacle. How do you receive it differently, particularly when you're conflicted by the desire to see everything, to miss out on no small, irrelevant detail, to soak it all in so you feel while also gleaming that it is next to impossible to see it all in the collapsed time frame that you have allowed yourself.

I wasn't sure whether I was a tourist or a traveller or an art lover or a wanderer when I took all those four trains to get to Firenze and then two more to get to Venezia. It was incidental that I was in Italy. I was a writer-in-residence in Bolzano/Bozen. My travels were circumstantial. I was already here. But, this fact had no bearing when I found myself in a two-hour long queue to enter the Cathedral in Firenze, or the two-hour long queue to see masterpieces at the Uffizi. I was simply one among several thousands who had descended in Firenze to bear witness to its centuries-old history. Just as I was one among several thousands who were in Venezia to fulfil a fantasy of being there.

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However, what I didn't expect to feel in these legendary Italian cities was anger and resentment. When the French writer, Stendhal visited Firenze in 1817, he was grossly overwhelmed by his sudden proximity to the interred bodies of the 'greats', namely, Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo Galilei, within the Basilica of Santa Croce. "I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen," he wrote in Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio. Everything spoke so vividly to his soul, and he walked with the fear of falling. When I encountered Michelangelo's David, Carvaggio's Medusa, and Cellini's impressive bronze sculpture of Perseus killing Medusa, I expected to feel something that resonated with Stendhal. Instead, what surfaced was a deep, almost ancestral anger. It dawned on me that the Renaissance, widely considered the zenith of Western civilisation in terms of artistic accomplishment, was a solely male enterprise. As I surveyed the thousand and one male interpretations of The Annunciation, I found women had been depicted either as virgins, whores or virtues.

Otherwise it seemed they existed only to give birth to men. Of course, patriarchy ensured women were kept in their place even in Renaissance Europe, but it saddened me that there was not a single retrospective attempt by museums and institutions to address this gaping whole in the fabric of world history. When I arrived in Venezia, having managed to quell my anger a little, I got really upset when I was told I had to pay almost 30 euros to see more art and architecture designed solely by men. As a woman - a member of a historically oppressed gender, it angered me that I had to pay such a steep price to gain access to a history that had so enthusiastically excluded and suppressed my tribe.

I'm unsure how to reconcile with the fact that the history of the West is a predominantly male history. I am keen to see the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, a Baroque painter, whose legacy has been overshadowed by the events of her life (she was raped by her painter father's colleague at age 17 and went through a notorious trial during which she was slut shamed). It's possible that my feminism will ensure and shape the specificity of my experience travelling. As a woman, I am still looking, I think, for a history to which I can claim a sense of belonging. I know that this will limit the pleasure and elation I am supposed to feel when I witness first-hand "great" art, or "masterpieces", but I hope my anger and anxiety can potentially disrupt the status quo.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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