We’ve continued our practice of both Classical and Medieval Latin, with visits to St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, the Villa d’Este, and Hadrian’s Villa. We’ve also been practicing memorizing sections of Cicero’s third Catilinarian oration in preparation for performing it in the Forum later this week. In addition to all of that, we’ve also moved into reading some Medieval Latin in connection with our visits to the Knights of Malta and San Clemente.
As usual our visits have included periods where our teachers explain different aspects of the site solely in Latin, and we’ve stopped to read inscriptions that we find along our way. Reading passages about a place before going there and hearing our teachers use the same vocabulary to give us tours has really helped my vocabulary learning lately, since I get to hear the same words used about the same subjects within several days of each other, but in different contexts.
They also brought a speaker (the founder of SALVI – a spoken Latin organization in the U.S.) in last week to give a talk on the history of the modern spoken Latin movement and resources and programs that are available to us if we’re interested in continuing with similar approaches for learning Latin.
We also had dinner in the excavated theater of Pompey last week which was amazing. The Italian food has been fantastic the entire time. The heat has remained pretty brutal, however, with the continued heat wave in Europe.