Our plane fought its way into Europe in the dark, pushing its way through rain and turbulence. We soared over the Alps after the sun rose. Gliding now above the Italian countryside we watched out the windows, enjoying how our perspectives were changing. Seaside towns and hilltop villas grew in scale as we neared Rome, landing in a modern civilization built on top of an ancient one.
As part of Winter Term MICDS upper school students were invited to take part in a 10-day tour of Italy, exploring the ancient world from the Romans to the Renaissance. Twenty-three students, accompanied by Natalie Griffin, Middle School Latin Teacher, David Armstrong, Upper School Latin Teacher, and Paul Colletti, Multimedia Specialist in the Marketing and Communications Department, toured Florence, Bologna, Naples, Rome and parts of the Italian countryside. “From the Roman ruins of Pompeii to standing atop the Duomo in Florence, our Winter Term trip to Italy was sensational!” Says Ms. Griffin. “I am a strong advocate of experiential learning. There is no better way to bring history, language, and culture alive than to immerse oneself in them.”
“In Florence, our students got to breathe the air of many of the most important Renaissance thinkers, painters, and tinkerers, and to see the classical works that inspired them” says Mr. Armstrong. Traveling north to Bologna by Italy’s train system, students saw another Renaissance city that has made a name for itself as one of the most modern and industrious of contemporary Italy–in fact, St. Louis’s own sister city! There, the group sat in on a session of the Bologna city council before meeting the mayor. The afternoon concluded with a cooking class where students enjoyed their own hand-made pasta.
After three days in Tuscany the group left Florence and headed south by high-speed rail to Naples and the southern Campania region. There, our students encountered the earliest layers of the cultural roots of the Renaissance. Students visited one of the world’s most important collections of antiquities in the Museo Archaeologico Nazionali di Napoli (MANN) in Naples, walked the streets of Pompeii in the shadow of a snow-capped Mt. Vesuvius, and toured the ancient Greek colony of Paestum. Another highlight of this second leg of the trip was a visit to a buffalo farm where students enjoyed farm-fresh buffalo cheese.
Returning north by bus, students saw the countryside of modern Campania and Lazio, stopped at the Catacombs of S. Sebastiano to visit an ancient necropolis, or „city of the dead,“ outside Rome’s walls, and then entered the city. Through visits to the Vatican and Capitoline Museums, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the Roman Forum, as well as to the many piazzas, famous sights, and culinary treasures of Rome, students got a sense for why it has been hailed as the Eternal City, ever-ancient, ever-new. As Mr. Colletti remarked, “It’s interesting to see how Romans are living in this city the same way they always have.”
Roman culture has inspired societies all around the world down to the present: through its primary languages, Latin and Greek, which have massively influenced law, the sciences, medicine, philosophy, and religion; its art, architecture, public infrastructure, and other aesthetic accomplishments; its legal institutions and customs, which provide the basic model for every constitutional republic around the world; and its cosmopolitan goals to bring the peoples of the world into unity in pursuit of a common destiny. “The Romans are not the only, nor even the first, to have cultivated any of these particular virtues (they didn’t even invent Latin!), but modern people value these things because of them” notes Mr. Armstrong. As Anchises, the father of the legendary hero Aeneas, Rome’s mythic ancestor, tells his son in Book VI of the Aeneid, Rome’s true prowess was in statecraft:
The MICDS Mission Statement calls for „responsible men and women who can meet the challenges of this world with confidence and embrace all its people with compassion.“ In many ways, this is a call to go far beyond the limits of the Roman model: after all, an unavoidable part of Roman history and society, as our students saw firsthand on the trip, is the inequality, exploitation, and dehumanization that was interwoven throughout all the grandeur, glory, and achievement we more often celebrate when we think back on the Romans. An ancient people, in an ancient context, we cannot ignore the ways in which they fell far short of our own highest aspirations concerning the dignity of all people and our own moral duty, „in purpose and service,“ to their betterment. But keeping those shortcomings in our field of vision, it’s also true that the Romans offer us an important thinking partner for contemplating how we can take up the task of building a better world for all its citizens in our own time, in the face of those struggles common to the ancients and our own day.
This trip bridged these eras and concepts for students in a way that was otherwise impossible. Ms. Griffin remembers, “halfway through the trip…a student turned to me and said ‘Ms. Griffin, I have spent so many years reading and learning about all of this, and now I actually get to see it!’ As a teacher, that is a priceless moment.”