Monte Celio, Mother Theresa

Una and I went for a Sunday stroll to break up our reading and journaling in the apartment. Sundays are big park days for folks in Rome, so we thought we'd head up to nearby Villa Celimontana to see how jumping it is on a hot weekend day. The villa is located on one of Rome's seven hills, Monte Celio, and like so many places in this city, there's a lot of stuff to see aside from the park area.

We walked alongside an outside wall of the park on Via di San Paolo della Croce, and I continued down Clivo di Scauro to San Gregorio Magno (above). In the center of the piazza outside San Gregorio Magno sits a bust of Mother Theresa. The inscription on its base indicates the bust was a gift from India, although I'm having a difficult time researching the impetus for such a gift (certainly we can safely assume something Catholic is going on here).

So many of the busts one encounters in her explorations of Rome are ancient and seemingly meant to honor some masculine legacy of imperialism. Sure, there's the classic figure of the Virgin Mary who has her fair share of makeshift altars and honorary portraiture throughout the city, but Mother Theresa is posted, in one way or another, at several sites, as a significant contemporary female figure of Catholicism that Pope John Paul II put on the "fast track" to sainthood shortly after her death by nominating her for beatification. It's interesting to think about where the memory of Mother Theresa stands six years after beatification and four years after the death of Pope John Paul II.

Check out a couple of good articles for comparison published when she was beatified in 2003, from the BBC and everyone's favorite Atheist, Christopher Hitchens.

Expanding the Roman Blogosphere

Yesterday, we had our first Street and Studio class in which all of the students in the Rhetoric of Rome program initiated their own blogs that they will cultivate and maintain throughout their education abroad experience in Italy (and possibly beyond). You can visit the Rome - Street and Studio page (via my 'Related Links' section) to connect to all of this year's students' blogs, as well as last years'. Here's a little glimpse into our blogging-in-action . . .

The Personal and il Politico

The topic of the Italian prime minister's marriage - and now, his divorce - has played out rather scandalously in Italian and international media outlets in the past five years. My poor reading skills in Italian leave me guessing a lot about what is being reported in la Repubblica, so I turn to the BBC and New York Times for supplemental information about and narrativization of the Berlusconis' very public marriage woes.

In several of the recent articles following Veronica Lario's (Mrs. Berlusconi, if you weren't quite sure) public outing of Berlusconi's alleged affairs with very young women, I have noticed an interesting move on the part of journalists to frame Lario's actions as decidedly feminist. In spite of the disapproving few who believe the Lario/Berlusconi saga should be worked out behind closed doors, Lario has chosen to remain vocal about Berlusconi's extramarital activities as well as what she sees as his inabilities as prime minister. Lario has even gained a following online that supports her election to a major political office - apparently not a regular occurrence for the First Ladies of Italy. The public airing of Lario's and Berlusconi's "personal" issues and the journalistic and popular responses to the situation serve as demonstrations of the blurring of personal and political realms. Further, Lario's insistence on publicizing their marital conflicts (and Berlusconi's subsequent insistence on a public apology from Lario) as an exemplar of how Italian women must hold their own in relationships with Italian men, suggests a possible challenge to a presumed, strict cultural divide between private and public in an Italian national context.

Image from the New York Times.

Magnani and Me

We begin our coursework in Italian cinema today with Roma, città aperta, perhaps the quintessential Italian neorealist film. Neorealist offerings are a far cry from the Hollywood-happy ending, popcorn-and-soda flicks many U.S. audiences are used to, but the films we watch throughout these seven weeks are a crucial component of Italian history and cultural memory that enrich our readings of our experiences in Italy and cinema more generally.Although there is much darkness in films like Ladri di Biciclette and Umberto D, we begin and end with movies that feature the bright performances of Anna Magnani (the last film being Mamma Roma, by the by). The neorealist narrative is, more often than not, a male-centered one, and so it is through Magnani that I have begun to think about the roles that women do play in cinematic and nationalist histories. Through their marginal presence or glaring absence, we might begin to think about the ways in which the function and depiction of women in film has potentially transformed as the rhetoric of film has evolved.

Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi

When I was in Rome last year, Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Piazza Navona was completely covered in scaffolding and under repairs, so I was denied a proper view of it. As Una and I took a walk through Piazza Navona today after orientation meetings, I finally got a glimpse of the fountain (along with hundreds of other tourists), finally stripped of its construction-site aesthetic - another sign of the complex relationship between change and preservation in this city. Also, not a bad way to begin the Roman summer/semester.

This Old Classroom

Mark recently sent last year's Rome vets a great article about the Palazzo Doria-Pamphilj (now a gallery) which is the larger building that houses our classrooms here in Rome. I think the theme of "change" in the article relates well to the way in which I anticipate embarking on this experience for the second time. Have a look see.

One more time . . .

I'm getting the ol' blog up and running again! I arrived in Rome this morning for another round as a teaching assistant in the Penn State CAS in Rome education abroad summer program. Being in the Eternal City feels excitingly familiar, but the shape of the program is a bit different this time. Perhaps most notably, we are small in numbers this year - the CAS program is composed of six undergraduates, two graduate teaching assistants, and one faculty member. We're living in an entirely different section of the city (closer to the bustling city center, only a few blocks from the Colosseum), and it's already quite hot for this early in May. Change is good, though, no? I'm looking forward to what's to come in the next seven weeks here in Rome and possibly on a few side trips in Italy. At the moment, I'm especially looking forward to starting my day with a delicious cappuccino tomorrow morning (arrived too late for one today!) and meeting together as a group for orientation at the Sede di Roma. I hope you'll stick around to see how things shape up this year. Ciao.