When in Rome...

Last week was midterm week, and after two midterms and three essays, I had Wednesday through Sunday off from classes. Since this was a good opportunity to travel around Europe, a couple of friends and I decided on Rome. We found cheap flights and a good hostel and spent four and a half days exploring Rome. The first picture is of our hostel in Rome (Kaitlin is on the left, Kristen on the right). The hostel was on the outskirts of the city, but it felt like a campground. We had a cabin, which had three beds, a bathroom with a shower, and a locking door (which meant we could leave our backpacks in the room during the day).



By taking a bus a couple of miles to the nearest metro station and riding the metro several stops, we were able to reach the downtown city. From there, we were able to walk to all the sights, including the Trevi Fountain, Colosseum (where we cheered on the imaginary, ancient Roman gladiators), ruins of the Roman Forums, Vatican (including the Sistine Chapel), Spanish Steps, and the Pantheon.

The Trevi Fountain. Legend says that if you throw a coin in, you insure your return to Rome.



The Colosseum.





The Colosseum and the ruins of the Roman Forums.




The Spanish Steps.



Piazza del Popolo.



The Vatican.






Bernini's Angels on the bridge.



Castel Sant'Angelo (Castle of the Angel).



The Pantheon.



The trip was great. In addition to all the historical sights, we also enjoyed the local cuisine--lots of pizza, pasta, and gelato. I don't have any complaints about the food in London, but Italian food was, by far, the best food that we've eaten this semester.

The View From Saturday

Throughout the course of my art history class, we are studying the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the ways that it changed the British Art world. In the 1800s, the Royal Academy Schools ruled the art world, including the painting styles, colors, and techniques. A student at the academy was restricted not only on his subject matter, but on the colors of paint and even the brush he used, based on his age and grade. In 1848, a group of 7 rebellious, young painters and writers formed a secret society. Believing that art went wrong with Raphael (and the Renaissance), they refered to themselves as Pre-Raphaelites and strove to achieve art resembling that of medieval art. Their subject matter was Biblical stories, Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, and other poems, including anything with a moral story. These painters would mix their own colors and paint subjects that the academy would not allow. While the Brotherhood only lasted a few years, the Pre-Raphaelite thought persisted. For our class trip a couple of weeks ago, our tutor took us up to Oxford for the day. It was a packed day, but our guide was lucky enough to get us into some great places to see the remains of some of the Pre-Raphaelite art, mostly in stained glass.








The library below was a very special privelege for us. Usually only Oxford students are allowed in, but our guide pulled some strings. The library is the building on the right in the picture below. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burnes Jones, and William Morris painted the murals on the ceiling. However, having no experience painting frescoes, their work has mostly faded or chipped away.





I could be an Oxford student...




Last weekend, we finally decided to book tickets for the London Eye. It is a giant, slow-moving ferris wheel that overlooks the Thames, Houses of Parliament, Westminster, and a good portion of London. We originally wanted to take a sunset "flight," so we could catch the views both in the daylight and at night. However, since it was a Saturday, the line was so long that by the time we boarded, the sun had already set. It was beautiful, but the glass/plastic windows reflected the flash of our cameras, so we were left with either very blurry pictures, or under-exposed pictures (an example of each is below).





The picture below is possibly the best of my batch, but the colors are not nearly as vibrant as in-person. I guess that is one of the limitations of cameras. I tried a different setting for the second picture below, but it turned out very blurry. Still a little artsy, right?







This weekend, my Shakespeare class took a day-trip to Stratford on Avon to see the Bard's birthplace, grave, his daughter's house, and his mother's house. While it was a good trip, sometimes I feel like restoration societies try to make too much out of what they have... The house in the first picture is of his Birthplace.



His grave site, inside Holy Trinity Church.


"O noble fool! A worthy fool!"


Mary Arden's (Shakespeare's mother) house was the most interesting of the three, mostly because of the live animals and old farm equipment.






The black-and-white setting on my camera brings out my artsy side.

In Flanders Fields...

Most of the classes in the program have trips associated with them. Over the past weekend, IES planned a trip to Belgium for my history class. While not compulsory, it was a great opportunity, and most of the students in the program participated in it. Over two days, we traveled by coach bus (over the Channel on a ferry and through France), visited a WWI museum, attended the Last Post at the Menin Gate, walked the ramparts of the original city, visited three war cemetaries, walked through reconstructions of the trenches, and enjoyed the chocolate, waffles, and beer. We traveled to Ypres (Ieper, also pronounced "Wipers" by the British troops during the war). The trenches along the Western Front surrounded Ypres on 3 sides, making it a target in the crossfire from nearly all angles. As a result, the city was completely destroyed during the war. In the decades after the war, the people of the city rebuilt it stone-for-stone, brick-for-brick. The first picture is of the market in the middle of the square.




The Menin Gate was built as a memorial to all the soldiers who were not found. The soil in Belgium is a thick clay, and it was flooded during the war to halt the German's advance. As a result, thousands and thousands of men were lost beneath it. Names are carved over all the walls, inside and out, of the gate...and it is one of three memorials to the missing. There were hundreds of thousands of men lost in this war, and bodies are still being uncovered in the land. In area of land fought over, an average of 30 men died per square meter.



Below is a medical center not far from the front. The next couple of photos are of the trenches that have been reconstructed.



Tyne Cot Cemetery. The spires from Ypres can be faintly seen in the horizon, slightly to the left of the middle (only a few miles from the cemetery/battlefield). This cemetery still has three stone structures that housed the machine guns.




In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
in Flanders fields

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high,
If ye break faith with us who die.
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Major John McCrae


The most haunting of all the information that we learned was of the firing squads. To make examples of deserters, British officials would take a man who had been sentenced to death and select 12 men of that man's unit to form a firing squad. That man would then be tied to a post and blindfolded. The firing squad would then enter the courtyard and pick up their already-loaded guns, one of which would be loaded with a blank. At the signal, the squad would fire upon the target pinned to the doomed man's chest. In one case, the man's brother was assigned to the firing squad (the officers soon realized and removed him, but it is still a very haunting tale). These examples were distributed among the army, but not the public. Only in 1989 was this information released to the public. My history tutor (shown in the picture below) and a colleague spent 11 years tracking down the names of the doomed men, and only two years ago did the British Government issue apologies to their families. The poem, written by Rudyard Kipling, on the sign says:

The Coward

I could not look on Death,
which being known,
Men led him to me,
blindfolded and alone.