I’m currently waiting for my flight in the Rome Fiumicino airport for my flight back to the U.S. Our program just dropped us off a little while ago, I’ve got a fun 9 hour wait ahead of me. I’ve got plenty of Latin to read and review in the meantime, though.
This past week we visited San Clemente, the Colosseum, Horace’s Villa, and the Forum. The Church of San Clemente has excavations below it containing another 2nd or 3rd century Christian Church, with a home purported to be St. Clement’s. Below that Church are the remains of a 1st century Mythraic Temple. At the Colosseum, our class had a debate in Latin, and at the Forum we recited memorized sections of Cicero’s Third Catilinarian near the Temple of Concord where he would have given it. We read and recited a number of Horace’s Odes at the Fons Bondusiae while we ate a picnic lunch near Horace’s Villa.
Overall, the program was great and I learned a lot, though I wish the classes were a little bit more rigorous and that we had more practice with spoken Latin built into our classes. The best regular parts of the program were the site visits with tours in only Latin which were really challenging and helped with fluency. Seeing the different sites around Rome and gaining an appreciation for where they are located relative to each other was extremely helpful, too, for reading comprehension when authors reference different locations around and near the city.
We spent the last night at Piazza Garibaldi overlooking the city.
