Ah, the first week of school. I’ve had my share of bad first weeks
(*cough* comp), but this week made up for everything bad that happened
last August. This week was all about integration: integrating students
from 4 schools into one student body, integrating our previous design
education skills into a foreign environment and integrating ourselves
into the city of Rome at large.
I don’t have classes on Monday mornings, so I didn’t even have to be at the school until 2:30 pm. I slept in, I shopped for hangars (nearly impossible to find here), I cleaned the entire apartment and STILL had time to kill. I made the beautiful walk to school, which takes about 30 minutes, in the early afternoon and grabbed a cheap sandwich at a local café for lunch before studio started. Little did I know that this café would become our usual spot. We ended up coming here every day! Not only are the sandwiches cheap, but they’re delicious, and the owner always warms them up for us. By the end of the week, she started recognizing us and even remembered what we always ordered. Now I look forward to going to lunch every day.
Our studio is a small room with tall ceilings and walls that are covered in frescoes and other fancy embellishments. Desks are arranged 9 to a table, and each one comes equipped with a lamp and storage. The room is very dark if the lamps are not on, which makes the work on the desks seem like the highlight of the room (though the frescoes are worthy competition). After only a few minutes enjoying our new space, we were ushered back upstairs to the main hall to go over the class and learn about our first assignments.
We were broken into teams with members from each school represented on all teams. I was placed in Group 5, with my roommate Ashley (from Arkansas), 3 Auburn students, a Philadelphia student and a Tennessee student. Each group was assigned a neighborhood of Rome outside the historic center so that we may grow to learn more about the city as a whole, rather than just its original site. Our group was assigned Testaccio, which is a neighborhood south of the historic center, across the river from Trastevere, where a lot of students live this semester. Each team was assigned 3 monuments in their area to find and take a selfie with, and the first team to email all 3 selfies to the professors would win bonus points for the assignment. Being the competitive person that I am, my group immediately left for the site. Luckily, we had one of the closest sites, while some other groups were forced to take long bus trips. 2 hours later, we had submitted selfies from the Non-Catholic Cemetery, the central square fountain and the old meatpacking plant turned art museum (later in the week we would find out that we actually did win!). Exhausted after our day of fast walking (and considering it was getting dark), we decided to head home and finish our analysis the next day.
Tuesday began with my Travel Writing class, which is a nice break from all of the drawing and graphic analysis that we architecture students spend most of our time doing. I was told that my blog would count for our weekly assignments, but we also get to go around the city and write what we see during class. After class my studio group and I decided to go back to our site to see it in the daylight. Testaccio was much more friendly and vibrant during the day, and went from being a sketchy area I would only go to for class to one that I wouldn’t mind spending some time in for dinner or on weekends. Turns out, the mound in the center of the town is made up of pottery fragments that the ancient Romans discarded, and the restaurants and bars surrounding the mound use this pottery as walls that ventilate naturally. Maybe I’m just an architecture nerd, but I thought it was pretty cool.
We took a bus back to the school where our studio instructors discussed our neighborhoods with us, but really all I could think about was food (which is easy when you’re constantly surrounded by it). As soon as class ended we found a restaurant with the best pasta I’ve had since being in Rome. I’m all about trying new places for every meal, but I’ll definitely have to go back to this one. And then, of course, we ended our day with gelato. Much like our lunch spot, we have found a favorite gelato that is conveniently on our walk home. They make the best cheesecake flavored gelato, and sometimes it’s the only thing that gets me through the day. If they had a rewards card, I probably would have already earned a freebie (things I miss about America…).
Wednesday is very different from all other class days, as it is the only day I don’t have studio. I have Historic Preservation in the morning, which has been an interest of mine since my first architectural history class. We get to take a lot of exciting field trips and see restoration construction in progress, as well as attend lectures regarding the theory and methodology of the restoration process in Italy, which is so much better than that of the United States. After a pretty long lunch break (back at our favorite little shop), we have the Architecture of the City lecture, which is a compliment to the drawing session of the class I have Thursday morning. Here we discuss the urban fabric of Rome and how it has developed over centuries, while still maintaining the successful qualities it originated with in ancient times. After class, we all went back to studio to finish some graphic analysis of Testaccio and then went home for dinner. The best thing about Rome is that you leave studio so much earlier than you do in Arkansas. I actually get to have a life outside of class exploring my new city.
Thursday began with the drawing section of Architecture of the City. As someone who doesn’t enjoy (and isn’t very good at) sketching, I was really dreading this class. We started off with a small exercise drawing the room we were in, but starting next week we will be drawing a lot more. Maybe if I get better at drawing, I’ll post some pictures from my sketchbooks… but don’t hold your breath.
After a long lunch break, we had our final studio for the week, which was a pin up of all the analysis we had done so far. We had the opportunity to compare our neighborhoods to everyone else’s, and now all of us want to see all the different parts of Rome. That will have to wait, though, because tomorrow starts our first free travel weekend! We don’t have class on Fridays, so we get 3 full days of free travel, without any worry about weekend studio assignments. AND, train tickets are so cheap here that you can make pretty spontaneous decisions about where to go without spending a ton of money on transportation. Tomorrow morning, Jessica, Caity, Ashley and I will be on our way to Milan and Venice to see what Northern Italy has to offer. Ciao!
Number of Columns Hugged: 1 (there aren’t many columns in Palazzo Taverna)
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Read more from Haley at https://haleywalton.wordpress.com/
To find out more about the U of A Rome Center semester program for Architecture, visit http://studyabroad.uark.edu/romecentersemester/
I don’t have classes on Monday mornings, so I didn’t even have to be at the school until 2:30 pm. I slept in, I shopped for hangars (nearly impossible to find here), I cleaned the entire apartment and STILL had time to kill. I made the beautiful walk to school, which takes about 30 minutes, in the early afternoon and grabbed a cheap sandwich at a local café for lunch before studio started. Little did I know that this café would become our usual spot. We ended up coming here every day! Not only are the sandwiches cheap, but they’re delicious, and the owner always warms them up for us. By the end of the week, she started recognizing us and even remembered what we always ordered. Now I look forward to going to lunch every day.
Our studio is a small room with tall ceilings and walls that are covered in frescoes and other fancy embellishments. Desks are arranged 9 to a table, and each one comes equipped with a lamp and storage. The room is very dark if the lamps are not on, which makes the work on the desks seem like the highlight of the room (though the frescoes are worthy competition). After only a few minutes enjoying our new space, we were ushered back upstairs to the main hall to go over the class and learn about our first assignments.
We were broken into teams with members from each school represented on all teams. I was placed in Group 5, with my roommate Ashley (from Arkansas), 3 Auburn students, a Philadelphia student and a Tennessee student. Each group was assigned a neighborhood of Rome outside the historic center so that we may grow to learn more about the city as a whole, rather than just its original site. Our group was assigned Testaccio, which is a neighborhood south of the historic center, across the river from Trastevere, where a lot of students live this semester. Each team was assigned 3 monuments in their area to find and take a selfie with, and the first team to email all 3 selfies to the professors would win bonus points for the assignment. Being the competitive person that I am, my group immediately left for the site. Luckily, we had one of the closest sites, while some other groups were forced to take long bus trips. 2 hours later, we had submitted selfies from the Non-Catholic Cemetery, the central square fountain and the old meatpacking plant turned art museum (later in the week we would find out that we actually did win!). Exhausted after our day of fast walking (and considering it was getting dark), we decided to head home and finish our analysis the next day.
Tuesday began with my Travel Writing class, which is a nice break from all of the drawing and graphic analysis that we architecture students spend most of our time doing. I was told that my blog would count for our weekly assignments, but we also get to go around the city and write what we see during class. After class my studio group and I decided to go back to our site to see it in the daylight. Testaccio was much more friendly and vibrant during the day, and went from being a sketchy area I would only go to for class to one that I wouldn’t mind spending some time in for dinner or on weekends. Turns out, the mound in the center of the town is made up of pottery fragments that the ancient Romans discarded, and the restaurants and bars surrounding the mound use this pottery as walls that ventilate naturally. Maybe I’m just an architecture nerd, but I thought it was pretty cool.
We took a bus back to the school where our studio instructors discussed our neighborhoods with us, but really all I could think about was food (which is easy when you’re constantly surrounded by it). As soon as class ended we found a restaurant with the best pasta I’ve had since being in Rome. I’m all about trying new places for every meal, but I’ll definitely have to go back to this one. And then, of course, we ended our day with gelato. Much like our lunch spot, we have found a favorite gelato that is conveniently on our walk home. They make the best cheesecake flavored gelato, and sometimes it’s the only thing that gets me through the day. If they had a rewards card, I probably would have already earned a freebie (things I miss about America…).
Wednesday is very different from all other class days, as it is the only day I don’t have studio. I have Historic Preservation in the morning, which has been an interest of mine since my first architectural history class. We get to take a lot of exciting field trips and see restoration construction in progress, as well as attend lectures regarding the theory and methodology of the restoration process in Italy, which is so much better than that of the United States. After a pretty long lunch break (back at our favorite little shop), we have the Architecture of the City lecture, which is a compliment to the drawing session of the class I have Thursday morning. Here we discuss the urban fabric of Rome and how it has developed over centuries, while still maintaining the successful qualities it originated with in ancient times. After class, we all went back to studio to finish some graphic analysis of Testaccio and then went home for dinner. The best thing about Rome is that you leave studio so much earlier than you do in Arkansas. I actually get to have a life outside of class exploring my new city.
Thursday began with the drawing section of Architecture of the City. As someone who doesn’t enjoy (and isn’t very good at) sketching, I was really dreading this class. We started off with a small exercise drawing the room we were in, but starting next week we will be drawing a lot more. Maybe if I get better at drawing, I’ll post some pictures from my sketchbooks… but don’t hold your breath.
After a long lunch break, we had our final studio for the week, which was a pin up of all the analysis we had done so far. We had the opportunity to compare our neighborhoods to everyone else’s, and now all of us want to see all the different parts of Rome. That will have to wait, though, because tomorrow starts our first free travel weekend! We don’t have class on Fridays, so we get 3 full days of free travel, without any worry about weekend studio assignments. AND, train tickets are so cheap here that you can make pretty spontaneous decisions about where to go without spending a ton of money on transportation. Tomorrow morning, Jessica, Caity, Ashley and I will be on our way to Milan and Venice to see what Northern Italy has to offer. Ciao!
Number of Columns Hugged: 1 (there aren’t many columns in Palazzo Taverna)
--
Read more from Haley at https://haleywalton.wordpress.com/
To find out more about the U of A Rome Center semester program for Architecture, visit http://studyabroad.uark.edu/romecentersemester/
