A Trip on SAS to Italy? ...Priceless!

"Amazing!" That was the common response when Semester at Sea students were asked about their experience in Italy. From historic sites in Rome and Pompeii to hiking Mt. Vesuvius and floating in a gondola in Venice, students were thrilled with the time they spent exploring and eating their way through this country.

Below is one of several blogs about the students' travels, photos, and thoughts about their time in Italy. We start first with Rome.

Click on the photo below of the Semester at Sea students to watch a You Tube video about their time in Rome.

Rome: History Around Every Corner
In Rome, seeing history is completely unavoidable. It is everywhere you turn—a piece of ruin that juts out from behind a bush, a fountain, a simple looking church that happens to hold the Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth).

“The stunning thing to me is that it’s not recent history, it’s ancient history. It’s not 200 years old, it’s 2,000 years old,” said Corbin Greene, a student from the University of Northern Colorado. Greene toured many of Rome’s historical sites during Semester at Sea’s three days in Civitavecchia, which is an hour outside of Rome.

Dozens of Semester at Sea participants toured Rome’s popular sites and were struck by the vast amount of history on almost every street throughout so much of the city.

During an Origins of Rome field trip, Greene and other students toured the Capitoline Museum, an archeological museum that holds much of the art and artifacts of ancient Rome. Housed there is the original statue of Marcus Aurelius, Rome’s popular emperor. But it was walking around the streets and touching the Coliseum and Pantheon that really struck Greene and his peers.

“As an American Studies major it really puts stuff in perspective to see places that have been around so much longer than the United States has been in existence,” he said. “Our storied past doesn’t even compare.”

For Jen Russo, history was coming alive for her everywhere. Russo has been studying art history this summer and was able to see much of the Roman art she had been studying in her class. “How often do you get to study something like this one day, see it the next day and have such an ability to relate to it again in a class discussion,” she said. “It’s just simply unforgettable.”