This information pertains to Summer Session 2009. If you would like to be notified when information about Summer Session 2010 is available, please sign up for e-mail updates.
Imagining Rome: Art Studio and Creative Writing in Rome
May 21-June 19, 2009
The following information pertains to the last time this program was offered. If you would like to be notified via e-mail when new information is available, please subscribe to the Summer Session announcement list.
Overview
"Imagining Rome: Art Studio and Creative Writing Workshop in Rome, Italy" is a summer study abroad program for students interested in studying either writing or drawing at Cornell's teaching facility in the historic city center of Rome.
Open to Cornell undergraduates and graduates and other interested students, the program allows participants to enroll for six credits of specialized study at the introductory, intermediate, or advanced undergraduate level. The program also offers independent study options for graduate students.
The syllabi for the courses are designed to take advantage of the text that the city of Rome itself offers. All students will be delving into the architecture, sculpture, painting, and spatial design of the city as well as the culture of Rome as expressed in its visual art and in the poetry, fiction, memoirs, and letters of writers, painters, and sculptors who have lived in or visited Rome.
Courses are conducted at the Cornell teaching facility in Rome, Palazzo Lazzaroni, a seventeenth-century building on a narrow side street that is within easy walking distance of many of the major sights of Rome, including the Pantheon, Campo de' Fiori, Piazza Navonna, the Jewish Quarter, and the Tiber (Tevere) River. Many of the program's writing and drawing assignments are made in association with site visits that all students and faculty make together to various points in and near Rome, including archaeological sites, piazzas, churches, museums, and one or two nearby hill towns. Students must be capable of ascending and descending numerous stone steps and walking on the cobblestone streets of the city and the uneven terrain of archeological sites.
Although Rome is famous as a city of artists, architects, and city planners—including Michelangelo, Rafael, Bernini, Borromini, and Caravaggio—it also has been for more than two millennia a city of writers, including Ovid, Virgil, Vittoria Colonna, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, Goethe, Stendhal, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Muriel Spark, Gregory Corso, Tobias Wolff, Junot Díaz, and Michelangelo, who was a poet as well as a sculptor, painter, architect, and city planner.
Cornell Rome students will read selections from writers who found their muses in Rome, including some selections in bilingual editions.
All classes are conducted in English and will meet daily, Monday through Friday, as well as on the first Sunday of the program.
