Drew Gordon: Rome

Travel and Orientation

Upon finally arriving after a seven hour flight, we were told that we were going to stay awake the entire day. Rishi and I and the rest of the group huddled into our rooms and began to unpack, having flown through the night into another day beginning at an early 9 o’clock. I had never imagined that one of my days could consist of two! Orientation began shortly after; the campus was absolutely gorgeous - a full vineyard to one side, a pool, and a multi-level dormitory connecting to adjacent buildings underground. At least the day was enjoyable, and because we hit the ground running (almost literally) we broke jet lag with ease. Bus rides were pleasant, mostly because the fast pace of traffic was dulled by the peaceful sleep of everyone in the group.

Campus View on a Lovely Night

Food

Before I arrived in Italy, I was informed of the amazing foods I would encounter. My peers could not have been more correct.

Immediately upon arriving at the campus we were fed with a commonplace assortment of breads and meats, a collection of which we would learn to be daily as our three week stay progressed. Every meal involved a pasta dish (surprise, surprise), a meat (generally beef or pork), a steamed vegetable, and more bread than I thought humanly possible to intake! The bread loaves were different than those we had back home - they were coarser on the outside but very pliant on the inside, and the loaves themselves became our most dependable and flexible food item.

Our first evening we had a traditional multi-course meal, an endeavor which took about two and a half hours to complete and maybe even longer to prepare. Eating outside became even more commonplace than the bread on such occasions, and as one who doesn’t particularly enjoy the outdoors, I ended up enjoying myself more than I could imagine. It was during our lengthy meals that our classmates soon became our friends, and our friends soon became our family, the grandparents of which were not only some of our professors but also the food preparation staff. From them we learned basic Italian for our foods (e.g. carne for whatever meat dish was served), and the burly grandfather of the group played many jokes on us unsuspecting students, including the appearance of a butcher knife as a means to cut small peaches and adding piles upon piles upon piles of bread to our tiny first-course plates.

The traditional dessert item at the campus was a fruit of some sort, but during our outings into Rome we indulged in gelato, a much lighter form of ice cream that leaves the eater feeling satisfied without feeling bloated. I myself many times ate stracciatella-flavored gelato, a creamy mix spliced with chocolate chips.

First Day Views!

Churches and Basilicas and the City

Travel into the ancient city of Rome was glorious. The campus was settled slightly outside, so we took the Via Appia Nuova straight in. By far my favorite sights to see were the churches and basilicas. St. Peter’s was by far the most glorious; vaulted ceilings skyrocketed into the heavens, altars touched the clouds, statues captured the faces of saints and martyrs and popes, and I found myself weeping. Personally, I am a Presbyterian, the son of a Presbyterian pastor, so the entire realm of Catholicism was somewhat unfamiliar to me. I arrived into one of the holiest cities also as a questioning believer, a stage most young people go through when they are put into a new environment without the guidance (or overbearing nature, depending on point of view…) of family members. Stepping into such magnificent buildings such as St. Peter’s completely and utterly changed my view on my own faith; in fact, it solidified it in a way I thought impossible.

The Glorious Vaulted Ceilings

The Amazing Paintwork and Gilding

The Famous Altar - Sky High!

Other notable sites included all of the famous cites such as the Colosseum, Arch of Constantine, Palatine Hill, Forum, and also the beautiful layered basilica of San Clemente. The upper (ground-level) church was eleventh century, old in its own right, and impressive; underneath was another church, roughly fourth century, dank and wet, but still impressive and preserved; even underneath that was a Mithraeum, an ancient room from roughly the first century where the religion to Mithras, pertaining to the sacred aspect of bull’s blood, was observed. After ascending back to the top of the current church, I read an inscription in Latin which pleased me tremendously once I realized it: “Glory to God in the highest, sitting on His throne, and on Earth peace and goodwill towards men.”

The Forum on a Cloudy Day

Trajan's Market

Amphitheater at Ostia

The Colosseum - Are You Not Entertained?

Triumphal Arch of Constantine

Midway through the trip the group took a semi-vacation to the Bay of Naples. Hardly a vacation (as classes were still offered, even in the breakfast halls and upper decks of various hotels), we visited bright and booming Sorrento, a city likened to New York City for its night life in a much, much smaller scale, white and gorgeous Capri, where the water looked like Barbicide, and notable Arpinum, both ancient and medieval, birthplace of Marcus Tullius Cicero. It was a quaint town, but Cicero’s statue was easily the centerpiece, on which inscribed was the famous phrase from his first oration against Catiline Non Feram, Non Patiar, Non Sinam: I will not bear it, I will not endure it, I will not allow it!

Beautiful Capri and its Barbicide-like Waters

The Sybil's Cave in Cumae

Rishi and I with Cicero in Arpinum

Latin

By far the most entertaining part of the trip was the actual Latin study. Unlike many other travel grants offered, the course in which Rishi and I were present was an in-depth Latin study, a course for which we were also offered college credits at completion. We were taught to focus on triliteral cognitive roots of words in order to decipher the meanings of works quickly, a task which proved challenging to a mind still worn out from long plane rides over the ocean! We were broken into groups based on our performance on the diagnostic test, analyzed in those groups for the first few days, then rearranged into two levels: 23-11 and 23-12. Each level worked through roughly the same amount of work, but the 23-12 group which contained most of my friends and me worked faster and more in depth, by the end covering a little bit more material than the 23-11 group. I grew to love my group dearly - it contained people to whom I grew very close. There were also many professors, some to whom we referred by first name, others by last, and even two by both depending on what situation we were in; this group included Isabel, a rising senior at the University of Dallas; Daniel, a recent graduate; Marshall Kibbey, jokingly known as pseudo-Dr. Kibbey because of his doctorate studies about to be completed; Dr. Gwenda-lin Grewal, a most interesting enigma who has a doctorate in philosophy and classics but also doubles as a fashion designer whose niche is lace gloves; and Dr. Sweet, the head of the program, an older man likened to Indiana Jones by his “Sweetian” trademark straw hat and leather satchel.

Rishi and I with the Multi-Talented Dr. Grewal

Psudeo-Dr. Kibbey...with Sarah just dropping in

The Mastermind himself - Dr. Sweet

It was from Dr. Sweet that I learned a greater love of Latin, more than I thought possible. Early in the trip he produced a fantastic lesson on the subjunctive, taking a little over an hour to express its presence in Greek and Latin, its split and fall from the Optative, and finally its collapse in English by the agent of modal verbs. We discussed the content of the subjunctive, a tense where everything is, as Dr. Grewal mentioned it, “slanted,” where matters are doubted in their trueness because of a hypothetical or personal form; the entire mood exists in an alternate realm from the indicative. We even discussed the actual formation of the mood’s forms, observing how the imperfect and pluperfect forms were created after the perfect and present ones as noted by their ease of formation in comparison to the prior conceived ones - they are based off of easily formed infinitives. From Dr. Sweet I also delved into challenging Tacitus, a fascinating writer whose passages are filled with hidden meaning, if you first can only supply in the verbs he omits! During our Naples trip, Dr. Sweet assigned us Pliny’s letters concerning the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. It was an amazing feat to be able to go back through the clean Latin and translate the entire thing without vocabulary or grammar aid.

Even in our diagnostic quiz prior to arriving at the campus and also every day in class we were asked the question which has plagued every classics student in especially recent times: “Why study Latin?” Throughout the class, each of us gathered our own reasons and our own opinions. There are the logical and statistical ones for which many schools still teach the language - that those who study it perform better on standardized tests. There are the reasons for which parents encourage their children to study Latin - that they themselves learned Latin in school and it helped them in their own pursuit of modern language study. Most importantly, however, there are the reasons for which I myself study Latin, the reasons which many of us on the trip and the instructors themselves alluded to regarding their own experiences - that I enjoy Latin, and I enjoy it because it unlocks higher levels of thinking and deciphering, that it forces an intelligent mind to process materials in a manner lost in time, and that it is the only true gateway to the thoughts of masterminds of the past from orators such as Marcus Tullius Cicero to writers such as Pliny the Younger to conniving villains such as Lucius Sergius Catiline.

From the trip itself I learned more about the Latin language than I have ever had before. It was an entirely different way to view the language. We focused tremendously on the words themselves. Unlike English, where we look through the words to find meaning, as English is such a language where vocabulary is connected through synonyms, in Latin we learned to look at the words, i.e. what makes them up and why certain words are used over others. For example, in English we can use many words to mean “fear”: I am afraid, I am scared, I am frightened. In Latin, though, we can use many words at the basic meaning to mean “fear” - metuo, timeo, etc. - yet each one

means a slightly different thing when observed closely, each with its own implied connotation and denotation. I learned to delve into the language, really into it, and as a result I found a much more satisfying center.

People

I met many amazing people in the program, many of whom I still contact daily, most of whom are involved in group chats for our “Latin Family.” There were twenty-one of us in all, all wonderful and talented, hard-working people who meshed quite well with one another. Of the twenty-one, fourteen were girls and seven were guys, so while Rishi made friends with the five other guys, I attempted, and successfully too, to make friends with the fourteen girls. Everyone connected so quickly, even people from different areas of the country from different backgrounds. There were those who didn’t have driver’s licenses because they lived in New York; there were those who learned Latin because of a Catholic education; there were those who were JCL fanatics and those who simply enjoyed the Latin language itself. I was personally amazed how easy it was to stay up past curfew talking in the common room for hours while the professors watched, happy to see us connect so quickly. From these quick unions we grew to help each other translate, finding out at what each of us was proficient and whom to ask for certain questions. We spent hours laughing at the pool, finding endless assortments of foods on which to put Nutella, and playing card games and ping-pong, all with an amazing tie for the love of a certain language. I could never, nor ever would I, trade those experiences for anything.

Party at the Etruscan Burial Grounds

Plane Rides can be Enjoyable...

I would sincerely like to thank the Wilson family for their constant support and generous funding for such an amazing opportunity; Mr. Paolicchi for all of the work he put in coordinating the trip and its many logistics; Mr. Gaither for his laudable efforts before his retirement, both in my own Latin classes with him and his work on the grant coordination; Ms. Ellery for my very sufficient preparation in Latin and the encouragement to apply for the grant; and finally Dr. Seay for both his encouragement for me to apply for the grant and the fundamentals he instilled in me as my Latin I teacher - I never imagined I would continue Latin to this point, but now I can say that I truly enjoy it. My sincere thanks to you all.