Students will earn 6.0 or 7.0 credits (depending on courses selected) upon successful completion of this program. Courses will be comprised of in-class lectures as well as city tours and cultural activities in Rome. Students, regardless of class, should plan to be involved in program-related or course-related activities Monday-Friday during regular hours with the possibility of occasional weekends or evenings. Remember, this is an academic program with a full itinerary.
During the application process, students will be asked to select two of the four courses as their preferred courses. This question is simply to give us an idea of anticipated preferences.
This course will use the city of Rome to introduce students to major trends in the art, architecture, and visual culture of Europe from antiquity to the present. While the course will focus on art produced and consumed in Italy, we will also consider whether such art should be considered Italian. We will make site visits to many of the major churches and museums of Rome, including the Pantheon, Vatican, Galleria Borghese, and other sites.
Download 0070 summer 2024 short.docx (27.93 KB)This course will critically examine the history of public and private collecting practices, the cultural and scholarly rationales behind collecting, and the legal and ethical challenges that collections face. Focusing on the rich collections of Rome, this class will examine how humans have collected artworks over time and to what ends. Using the city of Rome, its museums, and churches as our classroom, we will be able to see how collecting practices have transformed over time. Using the examples of Roman collections,, we will evaluate the arguments for and against universal art museums, the repatriation of works to source nations or original owners, and the protection of cultural heritage during times of conflict.
Download HAA 1025 Rome 2024 short.docx (27.63 KB)The goal of this class is to provide novice students with foundations of the Italian language, including basic grammar, vocabulary, and speech patterns, through the lens of art and art history in Rome. Students will work cooperatively in class and independently at home to build their grammar and vocabulary knowledge. Primary goal is to achieve competence in the spoken language, along with basic skills in reading and writing. Face-to-face lessons will be divided between time in the classroom and time visiting relevant sites in the city of Rome, in order to allow the students to employ on the field their newly acquired knowledge.
Intermediate/ advanced semester students of Italian Course Description: The goal of this course is to develop the students’ language knowledge, building on the knowledge acquired in previous courses, through the study of a wide array of Italian literary texts about the city of Rome and its history. In particular we will explore text from three periods, the Fascism era, the boom economico period, and the beginning of the XXI century. This will provide the students the opportunity to read literary texts of different genres and registers.
Download syllabus_ital0060_2117.docx (30.58 KB)CIEE is Pitt's partner for this program. CIEE is the country's oldest and largest nonprofit study abroad and intercultural exchange organization. CIEE has helped thousands of people gain the knowledge and skill necessary to live and work in a globally interdependent and culturally diverse world by offering the most comprehensive, relevant, and valuable exchange programs.
Lauren Perri
Hi! I'm Lauren, Program Manager for Arts & Sciences students. As an undergraduate student, I studied abroad in Marburg, Germany. Since then, my career in international education has taken me to many locations around the world. Particularly, I have an affinity for Florence, Italy. There is nothing quite like the challenge of navigating a new city, country, and culture! Let's chat about global experiences.
Professor Chiara Montera
Chiara Montera holds an MA in Italian from the University of Pittsburgh, an MA in History and Religious Studies from Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, and a certification for teaching Italian as a Second Language from the Università per Stranieri di Siena, Italy. She obtained a Doctorate in Education (EdD) in 2021 at Pitt's School of Education. Her dissertation Employing a Genre-based Approach to Teach Written Communication in Italian as a Foreign Language explores the use of a Genre-Based Approach applied to writing presentational communication in intermediate classes of Italian. In 2022 Chiara began a collaboration with prof. Alberta Gatti (CUNY, The Graduate Center) and became the project coordinator for the Center for Integrated Language Communities (CILC), a federally funded program which focuses on the teaching and learning of languages other than English, with a special focus on community colleges and minority serving institutions. In addition to writing pedagogy, Chiara is interested in FL pedagogy, the use of literature and history in FL instruction, and the creation of digital open education resources (OER) for the students in the Italian program. She also coordinates the Italian conversation club, the Tavola Italiana.
Professor Christopher Nygren
Christopher Nygren is associate professor of early modern art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and research focus on the intersection of religion, philosophy, and art in the Italian Renaissance. In 2022, his book, Titian’s Icons: Charisma, Tradition, and Devotion in the Italian Renaissance (Penn State, 2020), won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America. He is currently writing a second book-length project that investigates the phenomenon of painting on stone substrates, which emerged in Italy around 1530. This project is provisionally titled Sedimentary Aesthetics: Painting on Stone and the Ecology of Early Modern Art. Prof. Nygren is also developing several collaborative research projects, including in the Digital Humanities. From 2017 to 2019 he served as Principal Investigator on “The Morelli Machine,” a project funded by the National Science Foundation that sought to examine whether computational methods might be used in the attribution of old master paintings.
