Get Ready for Rome

The Castelli Romani are a cluster of hill towns just to the southeast of Rome. This podcast reviews a good new book that explores four of them shows how travel can stimulate our thinking as well as our other appetites.

After two episodes on the Forum Boarium, we move up to the Palatine Hill. At the same time, we move from Rome's distant prehistory and Aeneas to its founding by his descendant Romulus, the son of Mars. Later still, Caesar and his adopted son Augustus presented Aeneas and Romulus as precursors of the Caesars.

The two temples in the Forum Boarium as illustrations of Rome's cultural flux over the ages.

There is scant evidence regarding the prehistory of Rome, but the Romans supplied this defect by handing down and codifying engaging myths. Today we visit the Forum Boarium, where Rome's distant ancestors met and began to form the people from whom the Romans would descend, or so at least Livy and Virgil tell us.

Today is March 17, the anniversary of the proclamation of the birth or making of modern Italy. It seems strange to me that this anniversay is largely overlooked, so I invite listeners to think for a moment about its meaning.

If the Sistine Chapel reflected the moral vision of Christian Rome, is there any such coherent view in Modern Rome of how we humans should understand our purpose and live our lives? 

Popes have frequently attacked the moral, political, and intellectual developments that gave birth to modern Italy. On the occasion of the death of Pope Benedict, we today review his controversial Regensburg Address to see what it says about modern Rome.

We return today to the "secular" or non-religious character of modern Rome in order to see more clearly how much the Rome of the People has changed from the Rome of the Popes.

Today we introduce Michelangelo's "Last Judgment," his vast fresco painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.

The four Pendentives of Michelangelo's Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel represent four different dramatic stories from the Old Testament. What are these stories, and what do they teach?

We know that Michelangelo's painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was an extraordinary achievement, but what subjects does he represent and what teaching do they convey?

Michelangelo used painted architecture and numerous nudes to divide the Sistine Chapel ceiling into separate panels and give it a complex design. Today we summarize the elaborate arrangement he came up with.

Michelangelo dominates the Sistine Chapel, but the chapel's walls feature twelve frescoes by the previous generation of great Florentine artists. We look at two by Botticelli as an introduction to all twelve.

We return for a second introduction to the Sistine Chapel and outline some of the main challenges Michelangelo had to overcome in painting the ceiling.

This episode introduces the twelve frescoes on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel, which invite a comparison between the lives and laws of Moses and Jesus.

We today make a first visit to the Sistine Chapel and look generally at the three different waves of Renaissance frescoes that decorated it. Two of these are by Michelangelo.

The difficulty of seeing Ancient Rome is that not much of it exists. The distinguished archeologist Rodolfo Lanciani documents this, and today we compare his ways of explaining its disappearance with those of Edward Gibbon.

American troops liberated Rome from German occupation just 2 days before D-Day. What made it possible, and why did the liberation occur when it did?

We have taken an introductory look at the reasons Paganism was replaced Christianity, but why have so many of the magnificent buildings the pagans built simply disappeared? Was it simply the work of time?  We begin today with Gibbon's answer to this question.

We today consider Gibbon's explanation of how the Christians of Constantine's century advanced their faith by taking active measures against paganism. As he makes his case, Gibbon also extends his unflattering portrait of the followers of the new faith, perhaps to weaken their successors in his own day.

Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire advances five causes for the early Christians' triumph over their pagan and Hebrew rivals.  This podcast discusses them.

After noting the contradictory ways Constantine is remembered in Roman art and architecture, we turn to the main policies of this first Christian Emperor.

This short podcast reviews our goals and announces the beginning of our second season on April 21. The subject will be Rome, Constantine, and the Christianization of the Roman Empire.

I today announce that I've begun taking a break that I hope will also help me get ready for a new season of podcasts, and I summarize the topics and issues that lie ahead.

Travel can be educational, as our many study abroad programs affirm, but my recent return to Venice got me wondering whether it can also be misleading.

This short Mini Pod makes five points based on a recent trip to Rome and towns in northern Italy.

In this second report on my return from three weeks in Italy, I consider some evidence suggesting Rome is as postmodern as it is modern.

Today we venture beyond the central core of Rome to survey the most important sites on Rome's periphery.

I've just returned from a three-week trip to Italy, and I here begin a retrospective look at our travels, which were not much affected by COVID.

Today we survey the main sites to visit in Trastevere and in the area around the Vatican, an important step in preparing for a visit.

Centered on the Pantheon and Piazza Navona, the Campus Martius is for good reason Rome's most popular zone. Today we note its main sites to visit.

Today we review the sites on the Quirinal, Viminal, and Esquiline Hills, which are not so much hills as ridges that meet in the area of the Termini Train Station. They offer a rich mix of Ancient, Christian, and Modern monuments.

Today we inventory the main sites in the area near the Capitoline Hill, including the Forum and the Colosseum. This is an essential first step toward choosing what is most important to visit in this zone of Rome.

I offer here a few thoughts on how to plan a visit to Rome, from places to stay to the need to decide what sites you want to visit.

Having a big picture in mind helps you find your way around Rome. I offer one here consisting of a Fixed Point, Four Roads, and Five Zones.  

We return to the Hall of Constantine, one of the four Raphael Rooms in the Vatican Museums. Its main frescoes show crucial episodes in the life of the Emperor Constantine, but did they ever happen?

After an overview of the three Raphael Rooms that followed the Stanza della Segnatura, we focus today on the Hall or Sala of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor.

We devoted a couple of Mini Pods to the greatest of the Raphael Rooms, but what about the others? This overview should help get us ready for the Room of Constantine, coming up next.

Raphael's famous "School of Athens" is in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, but what else is in this room, and are its several parts brought into a harmonious whole?

While the beauty of Raphael's School of Athens is widely appreciated, we today probe the controversial idea behind it.

The Vatican Museums can boast the world's most beautiful frescoes, but just what is a fresco?

We begin our look inside the Vatican Museums with an introduction to the deservedly most famous fresco of the four Raphael Rooms. In the background, I wonder whether modern universities are still moved by the ideal it represents.

Friars are not monks, and the Catholic Church includes many different sub-groups or orders. Does this matter?

The Warrior Pope was also the first patron of the Vatican Museums. Why would a pope want to make public the nude statues of pagan artists and the books of pagan thinkers?

We here take a quick look at the moral questions raised by Pope Julius II's outrageous conduct.

We make a second trip to the Basilica of St. Peter in Chains, this time to focus on Michelangelo's sculpted Funeral Monument to Pope Julius II.

This Mini Pod reviews the big questions that always lurk in the background of this podcast series and also introduces a new interactive map.

We today review the conflicts that divide Ancient, Christian, and Modern Rome, with special attention to the various monuments used by Modern Rome in its struggle to bury the Rome of the Popes. Can we find, notwithstanding these many quarrels, something identifiable as Western Civilization?

We move from one basilica devoted to St. Peter to another, and this one requires that we get to know better the greatest sculptor of the Renaissance and a pope who wore armor into battle and also promoted the finest art of the Roman Renaissance.

Today we investigate two tombs under St. Peter's Basilica, one of a saint, the other of a sinner, or so at least the saint would say. But this sinner defends himself.