Rome, open for vacation
Summer School 2010 gets underway at Rome universities: lessons, trips and guided tours to help foreign students get to know the Eternal City
To be able to study Italian with Italians, a strong interest in our country’s immense artistic heritage and professional and personal reasons are all important factors that make it interesting and useful for foreign students to visit the great “art cities” such as Rome. In June, with the start of the scholastic vacation period and an ideal combination of learning and cultural tourism, the universities in Rome offer an interesting initiative for foreign students, for whom the Summer School programs have been developed, offering summer courses in Italian culture and language. A wonderful opportunity to study and learn, aimed at the vast and cosmopolitan world of students from other countries, offering them the opportunity to experience the best of the city’s and the region’s cultural assets. The Summer School, edition 2010, gets underway at the Sapienza Università di Roma on Monday, June 21st, at the Faculty of Human Sciences, supervised by Professor Paolo Matthiae. Language courses, conferences, debates, guided tours, encounters with artists and audio-visual and film projections will be offered. There are three subject matters that comprise the university courses, which will last until Saturday, July 17th, archaeology and visual arts, language and literature, cinema, theatre and music. Four weeks of intense brainstorming, to get to really know the city and its artistic and cultural life. Several subjects are offered to the students and prepared by the team of teachers, including Professor Tullio De Mauro: from the language spoken in Italy today to Roman painting, from Bernini and Borromini to the cinematographic art of Federico Fellini, from the public museums of the 1700’s to Futurism, from an analysis of writers such as Elsa Morante and Italo Calvino to the underground theatre of Roman cellars in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Not just classroom lectures but guided tours are also planned for the key archeological sites, the Roman Forum and the Coliseum, Castel Sant'Angelo and the Vatican, the basilicas dedicated to San Clemente and Santi Quattro Coronati, Villa Borghese and the Borghese Gallery, Piazza Navona and the Church of Santa Maria della Pace, the area of the Campidoglio and the newly inaugurated MAXXI.
Students are offered low-cost lodgings (in apartments, boarding rooms or bed & breakfasts) in the vicinity of the university or in a central neighbourhood, lunches and dinners at the university cafeterias, free access to the Biblioteca Nazionale and university libraries (Biblioteca A. Monteverdi della Facoltà di Scienze Umanistiche and Biblioteca Accorpata di Lingue e Letterature Straniere di Villa Mirafiori). On weekends the program includes day-trips, shows and concerts at reduced prices. Roma Tre and Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, Luiss and Lumsa also organize Summer Schools for foreign students with the same spirit and intentions: to cultivate awareness and knowledge of our country and invite these students to return to Italy, next time as tourists, together with their families.
Federica Alatri
President of the Regional Agency for the Promotion of Tourism in Rome and Lazio