The Rome Study Program

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Summary of the Program's 1999 Activities

Courses

ITL 312K Second-Year Italian -- three credit hours, taught by Antonella Olson.

The focus of this course is on a partial review of first year grammar with emphasis on listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As in the past, it had a very similar curriculum to the ITL 312K offered on the U.T. campus during a long semester, so that students are able to go on in the Fall in ITL 312L, fourth semester, with the same preparation.

The city of Rome and Italy are a living laboratory in which students can improve their language skills, vocabulary and immerse themselves completely into the Italian culture and environment. At the end of the session, the 312K students staged and performed one of the readings analyzed in class, a short story written by Stefano Benni. The host-families attended and were pleased to see their performance.


ITC 349 : Rome, Eternal City: Myths and Realities -- three credit hours, taught by Guy Raffa.

This is an interdisciplinary course taught in English with focus on the powerful myths of Rome-political, religious, cultural-from antiquity to the present. The analysis of historical, literary, and cinematic works was added to the artistic and architectural resources of the city itself.

The study was enriched by visits to sites such as the Forum, Coliseum, Vatican Museums, Galleria Borghese, etc. Students appreciated immensely the field-trips and learned how to look around themselves to discover and recognize the many treasures of Rome.


ITL 365: Contemporary Italian Culture -- three credit hours, taught by Guy Raffa and Antonella Olson.

This is an upper-division course taught in Italian with focus on major Italian cultural movements of the past three decades. Through selected works by writers, playwrights, film makers, and cultural critics, the course examined Italy's recent past to assess the challenges it faces at the dawn of a new millennium. Students read works of authors such as Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino.

They also studied two short plays by Dacia Maraini and Dario Fo and presented them in a final performance along with three other representations created by some of the students and based upon their reflections on the material studied in class. As it has been in the past with students of the '96, '97, '98 Rome Study Program, this year's student performance was impressive and the students' commitment remarkable. The host-families--our audience--were enthusiastic, once again.

School

The Palazzo Antici-Mattei was used as classroom space for the first time this year. In fact, both the assistant and the director looked for a new school last summer after being notified that the Teatro 20º Secolo--the school used since 1996-would undergo a restoration. They found the Centro Studi Americani (CSA)-one of the major Italian libraries of American Studies--situated in the majestic Palazzo Antici-Mattei, a distinguished baroque Roman palace. Its rooms are decorated with frescoes by Tuscan and Flemish painters of the early seventeenth century. The CSA provided, and will provide again next year, a spacious, elegant and distinctive environment for our students.

Field-trips

A . Included in the program's cost:

1) two orientation sessions in Rome;

2) a guided visit to San Peter's (Vatican City) and surroundings;

3) a guided visit to the Museum Galleria Borghese where the majority of Bernini's masterpieces are found;

4) a visit with Italian high-school students to Tarquina, an Etruscan town near Rome;

5) a guided visit to the studios of Cinecittà, the Italian Hollywood.

B. Optional field-trips organized by the director:

1) a three-day visit to Venice, where the students enjoyed, among many other things, the international modern art exhibit, the Biennale; the Academia-with masterpieces of the major painters of the Veneto, plus an exposition of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection-with works of major modern artists, plus a temporary exhibit of Futurist maestros;

2) a three-day trip to the Amalfi Coast with a guided tour of Pompeii, a day on the beach in Positano, and a tour of Naples. A two-day visit to Florence took place the last week-end of the program.

Guests

Dacia Maraini

Dacia Maraini, the 1999 winner of Premio Strega-the most prestigious Italian literary award-and author of one of the plays performed by ITL 365 students, accepted the director's invitation and came to the CSA to talk to the students and answer their questions.

The program's participants were invited to two lectures she gave during a series of cultural events in Rome.

 

The program was intellectually stimulating also in view of the conferences sponsored by the CSA such as "Cinema Americano Contemporaneo: Immagini, Cultura e Storia degli Stati Uniti" with Paula Rabinowitz and bell hooks among the speakers, and "The New American Writers Series" with Fae Myenne Ng.

The program was also honored by the visit of the Chair of the French and Italian Department, Professor Dina Sherzer, who had meetings with the CSA's director and president and spent time with students in and outside the classroom.

| PHOTO ALBUM SUMMER 1999 |

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