Skip to main content

Last Week in Rome

By


I leave Rome tomorrow! It has been a really great semester for me here in Italy; it's hard for me to believe that I have been able to visit most of the major sites of Rome, Venice, Milan, Ravenna, and Sicily while I've been here, plus went to Tunisia for a week and went to Naples, Pisa, Orvieto, Florence, and a few other small towns outside the city. I've seen Italy from top to bottom, plus a little of Africa!

This past week, amid and after finals, I've been trying to see the last few things on my list. Here are some of them:



The Ludus Magnus, gladiatorial training school next to the Colosseum. At right, view of Trastevere from S. Pietro in Montorio


Moses statue by Michelangelo; silver and gilt statue of St. Ignatius in Il Gesu. Having seen Moses, I can now say that I've seen all three of the Michelangelo statues in Rome!


The Ara Pacis, Altar of Peace built by Augustus, now in a modernist Richard Meier building


Details of the Ara Pacis


Medieval mosaic from San Clemente; copy of the shroud of Turin in Santa Croce


Imitation Etruscan temple superstructure at the Villa Giulia (National Etruscan Museum); at right, Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio


Renzo Piano's Auditorium in the Parco della Musica

At the end of last week was the Student Show with artwork from all the art classes offered at Temple Rome. I had a few prints in the show, which was quite well attended and full of interesting artwork! I have really enjoyed being at a school with lots of art students and where art is the focus of most students' studies instead of a hobby or vague interest.


Photography, Advanced Printmaking


Painting, Sculpture

I think my favorite part of the semester, aside from my trip to Tunisia, was learning how to cook Italian food and wandering around the Baths of Caracalla on a sunny day. When the weather is nice in Rome, the city is really beautiful. And I have discovered that I never get tired of Italian food! Rome has been great, but I'm glad to be going home after four months of travel. See you soon!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"

By
Reyner Banham 's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is an engaging overview of the important theoretical developments of the early 20th century leading up to the "International Style" of the 1930s-40s.  Banham does a fairly good job, in my opinion, of avoiding excessive editorializing, although he has a clear viewpoint on the Modern Movement and finishes with a strong conclusion.  In opposition to his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner , whose own history of modernism came out in 1936, Banham dismantled the " form follows function " credo that became the stereotype of modernism, arguing instead that formalism (a preoccupation with style and aesthetics) was an important, if not overriding, concern of Modern architects.  Two sections of the book struck me in particular: his analysis of Le Corbusier's famous book Vers une architecture (Toward a [new] architecture) from 1923, and his Conclusion (chapter 22), where he breaks the link between functionali...
1 comment
Read more

Vertical Bike Rack

By
The work of our hands! A little backstory:  We bought two bikes as soon as we could after moving here, so we could both bike to work.  After a few uneventful months of chaining up our bikes next to our car in the carport of our apartment building, Justin's bike was stolen.  (Mine was mysteriously left behind, together with Justin's pannier, which the thieves helpfully folded up and placed on top of my bike.  My only guess is that the chain holding my bike was harder to cut than the chain on Justin's.)  Since then, we've kept our bikes inside, hauling them up and down two flights of stairs to our third-floor apartment every time we take them out, which is usually a few times a week.  Ugh.  Better than buying a new bike every few months, though. We needed a rack that would keep the bikes off the floor, off the walls, and in as small a footprint as possible, without requiring us to drill into or otherwise damage the walls (or floor or ceiling). ...
7 comments
Read more

Book Review: De Architectura (The Ten Books of Architecture)

By
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio , The Ten Books of Architecture (De architectura) , trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (1914) with 68 illustrations drawn from a variety of earlier translations of the text (page numbers from the Dover 1960 edition). For summer reading, I doubt this is high on anyone's list, but I found it interesting enough!  I picked up the ever-so-famous Ten Books when I started auditing Mark Wigley's lecture on architectural theory this past semester; Dean Wigley is the dean of GSAPP and a flamboyant and provocative speaker who can somehow make even architectural theory seem interesting and controversial.  Of course, the semester begins with Vitriuvius and De architectura , as this is the earliest (at least, earliest complete) treatise on architecture to have survived.  Wigley, in his inimitable fashion, waved the book around throughout his lecture, in which he instructed us all to read the preface, maybe the first chapter on the education of an architect, and nothi...
Post a Comment
Read more