Rome Humanities Program

The Humanities Rome Program is open to Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Form students who are passionate about food, love to walk and explore old places, genuinely delight in conversation, and are open to being transformed by the truth of Rome. Students will live in modest European-style accommodations at the Centro Diffusione Spiritualita in Trastevere, a convent in the oldest part of Rome, where they can easily walk to the Piazza di S. Pietro, attend Mass around the corner at the Basilica di S. Maria in Trastevere if they wish, quickly climb to the top of the Janiculum hill with its stunning view of Rome, or simply stroll along the Tiber.

The formal structure of the Rome Program reflects the scope and genius of the Humanities curriculum at Portsmouth Abbey School. If the locus of this corporate endeavor is the classroom, a place of gathering, in which teachers and students fully participate in a dialogue about a particular text or definite idea, then Rome itself becomes the place and object of celebration. The real gift of this communal pilgrimage is the hope that some richer mode of seeing and conceptualizing reality can come into being.

Most importantly, the Rome Program should remind us that what we are doing is not a static enterprise in which a received tradition has atrophied into a collection of artifacts, but is rather an ongoing task of interpretation calling us forth toward our deepest fulfillment.Participants will depart from Boston and return to Boston from Rome. The total cost of the trip includes transportation to and from Portsmouth Abbey School and Logan Airport, round-trip economy class airfare from Boston to Rome, accommodations for 14 nights at the Centro Diffusione Spiritualita, ground transportation in Rome to and from Leonardo Da Vinci Aeroporto, and all breakfasts and dinners. Students are expected to provide their own lunches in order that they might have more free time in the afternoon to explore the city, learn to shop in local markets, and engage the language in a rewarding manner.

The order of the day revolves around the daily rhythms of Roman life. The art and architecture class incorporates tours throughout Rome including the major basilicas, a descent into the excavations below St. Peter's, a Wednesday general audience with the Pope, the Vatican Museum, and extend to various sites outside the city, such as the monastery of St. Benedict at Subiaco, Assisi, and Ostia Antica.