Week One of Core Classes

This week our school semester started for my program. Im enrolled in Ancient Roman Civilization, The History of Catholicism, and Women and Art. Each class has site visits in which the entire class travels to parts of Rome or cities in Italy. Sometimes they are during the actual class time and sometimes they are during the weekend.

My Ancient Roman Civilization course mainly focuses on the material remains located within the walls of Rome to examine the history, politics, economics, religion, social structure, public services, and various aspects of daily life in the city, from its beginning to the fourth century AD. Along with a few temples and the Colosseum, we will be visiting Pompeii at the end of November.

The History of Catholicism course begins with the foundations of Christianity in the teachings of Christ and St. Paul. We trace how the Catholic Church was formed as an organization and turning to central religious institutions such as the papacy and the monastery. So far this class has been my favorite. On Wednesday we studied scripture from the book of Matthew about Saint Paul. We also talked about the history of Rome and beginning of Christianity. In this class we will be visiting multiple churches and tombs, one of which including the tomb of St. Peter (which is accessible by special permission only).

My Women and Art course will be based around the Roman-born Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. It is designed to consider not only the life and career of this woman artist in its historical context, but also the impulse the study of her experience has given to women’s studies in the field of the history of art. This course includes a site visit I am especially excited for. It just so happens that this year an Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition will be held in Milan including almost sixty pieces of her work. (Which is extremely rare because her artwork has been dispersed throughout all of Europe) In a few weeks my entire class (around twenty-five people) will be traveling to Milan for the day to visit this exhibition.

I am still in the same Italian language class that I was in before my week break to Greece, but this is now a continuation course. The first course has already been completed and now we are starting a new one. Almost like we took Italian one for the first month we were here and throughout this semester we will be taking a less intense Italian class that be similar to Italian two.

Overall, I have enjoyed every one of my classes and also really like my professors. Each professor is very different from the other but they are all very enthusiastic about what they are teaching which makes the course even more interesting. The UC program is very intensive and has been known to be very difficult but judging from this past week I think I'm going to really enjoy this semester!