RILA Announcement (12/11/2012)

Editor’s Note: Because the final issue of the fall 2012 semester was devoted to commemorating Mr. Stephenson, the following article could not appear in print.

However, because of its time-sensitive content, we are printing it here for interested Gadfly readers.

Rome, St. John’s Style Mr. Gabriel Pihas, Tutor (Annapolis).

I wanted to updates students about RILA, which will take place this summer. But first, if you don’t know what RILA is: RILA (or Rome Institute of Liberal Arts) is a summer program in Rome, Italy, created and taught by St. John’s tutors, designed for St. John’s students. It is now in its sixth year. It is not part of St. John’s College, but the classes are run like St. John’s seminars, the seminar leaders are tutors and about 80 percent of our students have always been from St. John’s (Annapolis and Santa Fe). We also accept a couple of students each year from other schools. (Please tell friends at other schools about RILA if you think they would be good for us, and you want them to get a taste of what you do at the college.)

RILA is four weeks long, mid-June to mid-July. (A two week extension may be available for people who want to spend six weeks in Rome, if enough people sign up for it.) Classes are smaller, more intimate seminars, like preceptorials in size, but led by two tutors. There are usually around ten students (theoretically classes can range from eight to 16 students). Seminars meet four to five times per week, for an hour and twenty minutes each. We make it shorter in length than a regular two-hour seminar because there is a smaller group and shorter readings. Since the readings are shorter than our seminar readings at the college, this leaves us time for a variety of lectures and time to explore our surroundings. Last year we heard guest lectures given by the political theorist Thomas Pangle (University of Texas at Austin) on Machiavelli, another from the Dante scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale), as well as a third lecture on Hegel by Jim Carey, a Santa Fe tutor. (The lectures for the coming year are yet to be announced.)

As for what we see on the excursions: Rome of course has great ancient Roman sculpture, painting, and architecture. But in addition, since southern Italy and Sicily were Greek for most of antiquity, there are lots of ancient Greek works around. North of Rome are the walls of the many Etruscan painted underground tombs, which, except for vase-painting, are one of the only extant examples of high classical period Greek painting. To the south, Naples has a great collection of Greek sculpture, while Paestum (near Naples) has the best-preserved Doric temples in the world. Of course, Rome and the surrounding area are also packed with the most important works in medieval, Renaissance, and baroque painting, sculpture, and architecture. In RILA we try to use all these resources both to understand what visual arts and architecture are as independent disciplines, and also in the service of questions in our seminar readings. We approach art and architecture mainly as earnest amateurs, but also with some preparation. There are weekly lectures on art/architecture and history in Rome given by St. John’s tutors and by art historians. (This year we will also have a tutor who is at the same time an art historian, a first for RILA.) We do a number of excursions and on-site discussions each week, some with just tutors, some with art historians or classicists together with tutors.

These excursions and lectures aim to help you get things out of Rome that you could

never get out of Rome as a tourist collecting the sights. We try to make Rome and its resources a part of your thinking about big issues that extend beyond Rome, with the hope that it makes you read the books differently.

This year RILA will offer students two classes from which to choose. One is designed to address the art of Rome in an important way, the other is more focused around the history. The first seminar is called “Beauty and the Sacred,” and it takes up art and eros, and their relation to theological issues. We read an ancient, a medieval, and a modern text, namely, Plato’s Symposium, selections from Dante’s Comedy, and Hegel’s Aesthetics. For those of you who don’t know Hegel’s Aesthetics, Martin Heidegger said it was “the most comprehensive reflection on the essence of art that the West possesses.”

It gives one of the best accounts of classical sculpture as well as of modern art. It is not simply aesthetics, but also art history at a uniquely philosophical level. This book makes a good supplement to a St. John’s education, since the seminar list does not include any works chiefly dedicated to aesthetics or art. I will co-teach this course with Sarah Benson, who in addition to being a tutor, happens to be an art historian who specializes in the art of Rome. The other class is called, “The Virtue of Republics and the Soul of Empire,” in which we focus on ancient and modern views of Rome. In this class we read mostly non-Program books by Program authors: Livy’s Rise of Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s City of God, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, and some of Shakespeare’s Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus). These readings make a good supplement to St. John’s as well, providing insight into Rome’s history that can help you better understand, for example, how Virgil attempts to revive republican virtue in the Aeneid. But the readings in this course also allow you to think about what republics and empires look like in modern perspective. This course will be taught by Lijun Gu and Joe MacFarland.

We will also visit two beautiful cities in central Italy, Orvieto and Siena. Most students want to stay and live the rest of their lives in these cities.

All the details of this summer’s classes will be put up on the website in a week or so. I wanted interested students to know the basics about the program before they left for winter break, in case they wanted to discuss the program with their families.

Now, about the logistical side of classrooms, housing, and fees: We hold classes under the arches of a beautiful Renaissance building built in 1582 (which some claim existed even before McDowell Hall). It was commissioned by St. Ignatius Loyola himself, founder of the Jesuit order, to house the first Jesuit school, then known as the Roman College (it now houses a public high school and offices of the Italian ministry of culture). It was where Galileo sometimes lived and where he presented work from his Two New Sciences, and where Roger Boscovich, another figure from junior lab, lived and studied. Galileo was condemned by the rector of the Roman College, St. Bellarmine, in a room across the street from our classroom. This unusual building is right at the historical center of Rome, one block from the Pantheon. The walk to the school across the Tiber River, through ancient, medieval, and Renaissance neighborhoods, is a pleasure. We have access to this building because of generous friends in Italy who help get us little perks, like entrance into the Vatican without waiting in the hours-long lines, and a day or two in classrooms in the Vatican itself.

We are using new apartments to house students this year. These apartments will be in the Castel Sant’Angelo neighborhood and in the Trastevere neighborhood. The new

apartments are all well located, all in the historical center of Rome, about a 15 – 20 minute walk from school. They have newer appliances and fixtures than the apartments we used in the past, and are run by a different agency. All students are housed with other RILA students.

The program costs $2,800 for tuition, and $800 - $1100 for housing. These costs do not include airfare, meals, or other extras. RILA and its donors provide a few fulland half-tuition scholarships for St. John’s students every year. Note that these tuition scholarships do not include housing, airfare, meals, and incidentals. More details about this will be on the website. Applications for financial aid are due on February 13th, applications for admission are due for admission on February 20th.

For details about the RILA programs, the website is www.rilarts.org, but keep in mind that the website may not be updated for a week or so. (You can already begin an application with the online form, however.) There is also a RILA Facebook page, with lots of photos of past years that students have sent in. You can take a look at the photos from past summers to see people in the classes over the years, and for pictures of our location and some of the places we visited together. Feel free to contact me with any questions, gpihas@sjca.edu.