The Obelisk Project and Other Tales: Week 1

EDIT: For some reason this saved as being published on Thursday, but really, it was Sunday afternoon.

Tuesday morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (or otherwise-- see the end of my last post), the thirty-seven students trekked up to the fourth story conference room, where Jeremy gave us the day's assignment.
"Today, in accordance with time-honored Centro tradition," he said as he passed out the assignment sheet, "you will complete the Obelisk Project." We waited expectantly for him to continue. "You have been divided into six groups, and each group has been assigned a primary and a secondary obelisk. Your task is to locate these obelisks, visit them and take pictures of yourself with your obelisks to prove that you have found them. For your primary obelisk, translate all of the Latin inscriptions on it, research its history, where it came from, how it got there, why it is where it is, and give a fifteen minute presentation to the class. For your secondary, tell us something interesting about its location. You have your bus passes, or you can hoof it; you've got the internet and a pile of resources in the library. Presentations start at 5:30. Go."
What a brilliant assignment. Genius, really. In one morning all of the students would learn about the geography of Rome, including its major thoroughfares, bus routes, metro stops, and trams, the history of several monuments, practice their Latin, see some sights, work as a group, and learn to use the library.
It worked. My team, aided in part by one member's extra week of time in Rome, found both of our obelisks early on. On the first bus ride (the 75, one I will certainly come to know well) we chatted in close quarters and kept half an eye at the new city surrounding us. It was a moment of excitement when we crossed the Tiber, and at one point I glanced out my window to see an oddly slanting wall support almost behind us, the towering, colonnaded wall curving away. I gasped and quickly turned to Sam, a girl in my group.
“Was that—…“
“I think so!”
“Aaaah!”
And from there we burst into a series of uncontrollable giggles. The Italians around us were probably rolling their eyes at us brutti Americani, tourists who didn’t even know what we were looking for.
Our obelisks were an easy catch. One was at the top of the Spanish Steps, supposedly the hangout for American tourists and young Italians looking to …”practice their English.” The other was in one of the zillion piazze in Rome, this one on the Esquiline hill. Because Sam’s foot is broken and her ankle is sprained (an old wound, but still delicate), and because it was starting to rain persistently, we returned to the Centro before noon, ate lunch, and began work on the translation and presentation.
When we presented for the class that afternoon, the groups became competitive about their obelisks. Superlatives like “biggest,” “first made,” “first in Rome,” and “coolest” all were tossed around. We had no choice but to dub ours (what one member of the group described as the sadly-botched clone of one of the legit superlatives) the “scrappiest” because it had withstood all sorts of abuse and was still standing. Not that the others hadn’t.

Wednesday was the first day for my other two classes, Latin and Greek, which are unfortunately scheduled in back-to-back one-and-a-half-hour blocks. Were I to take Elementary Italian, that would make it three in a row. So, despite the fact that I feel bad every time I expose my bruttishness and really would like to learn Italian well enough to communicate in sentence form, I can’t even force myself to audit it. (Side note: this morning I had my first encounter with a friendly and linguistically helpful Italian, the barista at the bar (café) where I got breakfast. As my brunch buddy Lana attempted to ask about a certain stuffed pastry, he corrected her question of “what is it?” and started listing the basic ingredients to make it clear. The food was delicious, and I will definitely be back. On the other hand, last night I went to a Chinese restaurant and attempted rather unsuccessfully to deal with a double language barrier.)
I am in the Urbs Romana (“the Roman City”) Latin course, which is a survey of chunks of literature relating to Roman cities (as opposed to just Rome itself). Jeremy is my professor for it, and he seems enthusiastic about it and well on top of the material. We’ve started off with Varro and Vergil and are diving into a large pile of Livy, all of which to this point have to do with the founding of cities. (I believe… I can’t make any relevant sense out of what I’ve translated from Livy so far. Maybe he has to segue into it.) We are basically expected to understand the material, so that we are not nitpicking over grammar during class, and we will discuss it and how it ties together and to everything we’ve learned so far about the Roman world. It’s meant to go hand-in-hand with the main course, the Ancient City. The first session of class was very engaging, and I have high hopes for the course.
Greek (Medea), on the other hand, was awkward. Joel, the grad student, is quiet, and he didn’t seem like he wanted to be there. We discussed the expectations for the course, and he was sure to set boundaries between himself and the students. His attitude is a bit cynical, so even if he really is passionate about the play, and teaching it, it really didn’t come through. Instead of doing sight translation, which would have been nearly impossible for me (and at least a few of the other students), we ended class early, so a few students and I went into the computer lab to work on translation. After an hour, we had conquered 10 lines. I still have 38 to go for class tomorrow. Hopefully it won’t be quite as painful as this all semester.
The Centristi have had several great trips this week beyond the Obelisk Project, and I will summarize them briefly here. Thursday morning we visited the Piazza Navona (the one with the fountains and a gorgeous church), formerly the site of the Stadium of Domitian. The theme of the class this week has been the topography of Rome and how the ancient plans affected and still do the setup of the modern city. Where the racetrack was is the piazza, open, long, and rounded at one end. The buildings around it were built in place of more ancient buildings which were, in turn, built upon the foundations and ruins of the stadium (it’s all so much easier when you don’t have to supply your own foundations for your structures). As everywhere else in Rome, here the ground level has risen dramatically since ancient times, and the ruins of the stadium are well underground. One large part has been excavated (the building above now supported by other means), and the remains are partially visible from the street but are blocked off. We were privileged enough to be able to go down into them for a lecture from Nigel, which was very interesting. (I won’t bore you, Dear Reader, with the details.) After this we made a similar visit to the Crypta Balbi, formerly a large theater and sunken portico near the Forum Romanum, now almost entirely covered over. Recently a small part of it (a chunk of the porticus next to a colonnaded market) was excavated and the building above converted into a museum. The structure and everything above was a very strong example of the ways that the area had changed in the past 2000 years, how its ruins were a site for medieval houses, how walls had been built up, smashed, changed, burned for quicklime, quarried into, etc. We were permitted to tour, in small groups with Nigel and under the watchful eye of a custodian, the excavated remains, which extended at least two stories underground.
Friday afternoon we took a trip to the Epigraphic Museum, where we looked at inscriptions for several hours and attempted to translate them. (I realize this sounds boring…) One task we have been assigned is to choose some inscription, not necessarily from the museum, translate it, and write a paper analyzing it. The trip to the museum was partially meant to expose us to the task so that we can really think about what we’re doing when we select our inscriptions. I will certainly have to go back.

Stepping away from Classics for a bit: Thursday afternoon was the first session of the Art History class offered here, and I decided to audit. This particular course deals with Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, geared especially toward students of the Classics. We have the advantage of understanding without much effort many of the themes expressed in Renaissance art (for example, classical history, ancient mythology, and classical architectural styles, and many of us are fine on the Christian element, if not the iconography), but we lack any knowledge of Italian history post-700 AD, we don’t know much about Italian aristocracy, court life, papal priorities, artistic techniques and symbolism, and a slew of other details. We’ve heard of all the Renaissance artists lucky enough to get Ninja Turtles named after them, plus Bernini and possibly Pope Julius II.
The “lecture” was entirely the syllabus and “nuts and bolts” of the course. Despite the fact that the professor, whose name I still don’t know, rattled on at lightning speed and never paused for air, we took nearly the entire hour and a half and never got to even an outline of Renaissance history. I happened to be exhausted from the morning’s excursion and the week’s jet lag, the lights were off, despite the lack of slides, and it was cold in the room, so I kept nodding off. I was disappointed, but I wasn’t about to skip out on Friday morning’s field trip, a local introduction to low and high Renaissance art, religious and secular.
Our first stop was a church very near the Centro (maybe a 15-minute walk), dedicated to St. Peter and run until very recently by Franciscan monks (now it’s under the control of the Spanish Royal something-or-other). Unfortunately our long-winded but fascinating professor lectured outside in the frigid air, first outside and then in the much-colder courtyard when we were allowed in, for more than an hour. He discussed the contrast between the low Ren. façade of the church and the high Ren. little round building in the courtyard. Names, dates, and other important art-historical details have seeped out of my head already, though I think I would recognize them if they were brought up again, and I won’t attempt to enlighten you with what fascinating facts and stories I do remember. In any case, it was great. Following our 35-degree lectures we trekked into the church to examine one of the little chapels. Again we got a lightning-speed but still lengthy lecture, this time about the idea of sponsored chapels and the commission of Sebastiano, disciple of Michelangelo, to paint this particular one. Here I discovered elements of art creation that had never occurred to me before, and that had never been taught to me. (As a point of reference for myself more than for you, the chapel showed two prophets sitting on the vaulted ceiling, below which was a depiction of the flagellation of Christ—done in oil on stucco with a secret technique perfected by Sebastiano and never revealed, which art historians still don’t know how he accomplished—in the palace of Pontius Pilate, with Sts. Peter and Francis in alcoves off to the sides in the same painting.)
After the church we visited the Villa Farnesina (the little Villa Farnesi), which was originally the Villa Chigi, built by the man who was at the time the richest man in Europe. It was spectacular, and we focused our attention on three rooms. The dining room was my favorite, with an elaborate ceiling in beautiful panels and several different artistic programs. At first glance the artwork seems surprisingly familiar, many mythological figures standing around in their various panels. And then the art history hits you. The spectacular ceiling, it turns out, is a very precise astronomical chart of the constellations and their positions as they would have appeared two hours past sunset in central Italy on the date of Chigi’s birth. Another program was painted by Sebastiano, and two paintings done in competition with each other depict Polyphemus (again, Sebastano) and Galatea and her entourage (Raphael). A room in the upstairs is painted with architectural perspective to show a colonnade through various apertures, and the view off the supposed balconies around the room is the Italian countryside as it would have appeared at that time, and from that perspective. The last room we focused on was a bedroom shared by a and his mistress, who was of low birth and therefore not an acceptable wife. She stayed at the Villa, and he would visit her there. The room, richly decorated, has on one side a painting of Alexander and Roxanne, as he proposes to her and she is being simultaneously stripped by cherubs on an elaborate bed meant to look much like the sumptuous (I mean ridiculously extravagant) bed shared by the real-life couple in the room.
Yesterday (Saturday) I explored the neighborhood a little more thoroughly, and in the afternoon I made a mad dash to a museum with Ben to find a sculpture I must present to the class (when we visit the museum itself!) and write a paper on. I was pleasantly surprised to find it such an awesome statue. It is called the Terme Boxer (in English—the Italian title was Pugile), and it’s a Hellenistic bronze statue of a bearded boxer, beat up and exhausted after a fight. The museum (Palazzo Massimo) is full of gems of Classical art history, and as Ben and I raced through it, trying to absorb as much as we could before it closed, we would variously find ourselves face to face with Augustus as Pontifex Maximus and the Discus Thrower mid-swing. That is yet another museum I absolutely have to explore in greater depth.
Today, except for breakfast, dinner, and this crazy-long post, is devoted to my already-huge amount of homework. I may in the future discuss more about the individuals at the Centro, but probably not in much depth, because they all can read this without a problem (other than length), and there’s no reason to violate their privacy. I will also post pictures whenever I get around to reinstalling the software.

Ciao!