Wrapping It Up

In six hours, I will be leaving Italia.

Since I can't deal with the emotional magnitude of that statement just quite yet, I am going to summarize what I've been doing for my last few weeks in Rome.

Way back in the beginning of the semester, I believe I said something about weekly blogging about onsite classes.  It turned out those blogs were few and far between.  Even though I took my last exam this afternoon, here is an update:

Art History

"If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it!" As the cheesy music T-Shirt slogan goes.  The last half of my on-site art history class dove into the world of Baroque.  Notable Sites: Il Gesu was the model for pretty much all of the churches after the 1500s.  The ceiling of Il Gesu was painted by Gaulli in the late 1500s and represents the merging of the art forms.  It's hard to tell where the architecture, sculpture, and painting start and stop.  The rest of the semester was filled with even more beautiful churches, incredible works of art, and an awkwardly dramatic documentary series on Carvagio and Bernini, one of those that has an art expert with a British accent narrating the timeline while semi-famous actors that are in a rut do dramatic walking scenes with very little actual acting.  Informative and slightly hilarious, but beautiful.

Sociology

So, it has become clear that my Sociology professor is...interesting.  After the Midterm, he told us he does not believe in Passports, he thinks anyone should be able to live and travel where they want, and he firmly argues there is no such thing as "preserved nature."

The second to last week of class, he took us to the Mouth of the Tiber river.  Literally.  We took a tram to a bus to a train all the way to the end, then we took a bus to the pier and walked to the very entrance of the river.  The lecture was only 20 minutes long before we had to start the trek back.



The week before that, he took us to meet his friends.  His friends are gypsies, most of them without papers, living in illegal housing on the outskirts of the city.  While it was fascinating to see how these people live, it was difficult to communicate.  I felt guilty because they made us lunch and everything.  "Hi, I'm really interested in why you had to leave your own country and come to Italy, but I'm just going to sit here and eat your food because you can't understand me. :\ Two hours after we left, there was a police raid of the camp.

Finally, my very last Rome activity, Vatican Museums Under the Stars.

While most visitors pack into the museums and spend hours being shuffled along by tour guides, I had the entire museum almost completely by myself, with galleries lit by candles and moonlight.

What an amazing way to end the semester!