First class day in Rome

Welcome to my blog. Here I will share with you what I experience in my study abroad trip to Rome.

I suppose it is necessary to provide you a light background of my program, as well as my hopes for what to gain from this experience, given that this is my first blog entry.

I am in a program called From the Caesars to the Saints: Walking Ancient Rome. The point of this program is to visit and learn about the remnants of ancient roman society, while simultaneously having the modern Italian experience. Aside from this, I personally aim to gain additional experience in an environment that I would consider outside of my comfort zone.

The point of this blog is to provide and communicate my experience of the ancient world to you, so, unfortunately, information on my consumption of large quantities of Italian food and gelato will be absent.

The first site that the class traveled to was the Circus Maximus, which was a massive roman chariot racing stadium. The circus was supposedly laid out in the valley between the Palatine and Aventine hills by the kings of the 6th century BCE. To fully grasp its size, by the time of its completion, the circus could hold 250,000 people. The Circus Maximus now serves as a public park, which was made surprisingly clear to us as people began running around the track. This is in stark contrast with the Roman Forum, which was our second destination.

The Roman Forum was essentially ancient Rome's downtown area. It was a space for everything from political assemblies to public funerals. The forum was filled with many monuments and other buildings such as the Curia, Basilica Julia, and the temples of Castor and Vesta. With the amount of information that could be gained researching the Roman Forum, you would be better off looking into it on your own than reading a simple blog entry. What I noticed most, however, was that the Forum was treated the opposite of how the Circus Maximus was. Everything was marked off with handrails, and people were kept away from the monuments. This might seem an obvious thing to do, given that the Circus Maximus is a dirt oval, whereas the Roman Forum is made up of buildings that are gradually deteriorating, but it made me wonder about history. What do we preserve, how do we preserve it, and why?