Oct 29, 2020

The art in Rome’s churches and museums includes many characters with halos and many without clothes, but these two groups rarely overlap. This pod first encourages visitors to Rome to observe when and where we see halos on the one hand and nudes on the other. It then draws on examples from the Galleria Borghese and...

Oct 27, 2020

Italy was not unified until 1860, and even then it lacked Rome, which remained under papal rule until 20 September 1870. Why did the supporters of the Risorgimento want to change Rome, and how did they do so? We here prepare to visit the monuments of Modern Italy by learning a little more about the main failures and...

Oct 22, 2020

We here observe several places in Rome that offer dramatic evidence of how much ground level has changed over Rome’s long history. Doing so deepens our understanding of how much time has passed since antiquity, of how transient some human achievements are, of how depopulated Rome became during the Middle Ages, and...

Oct 20, 2020

This pod presents a quick overview of how Rome changed after it became Christian, both in its prevailing art and architecture and in its soul. It notes that at the same time as official Christianity took over Rome in the fourth century, there was a precipitous decline in Rome’s prominence, wealth,...

Oct 15, 2020

Rome is home to Pasquino and five other “Talking Statues,” which are exceeding popular with tour guides. For the last three centuries of Papal Rule in Rome, the statues were used like social media bulletin boards, but with anonymous postings pinned up at night. They were often witty and irreverent toward the...