Day 16 (5-26-09) San Clemente and the Ministers Offices

Today started as another normal day. We started off with an art history class that took us to four churches. A figure in one of the churches, San Bernardino, is photographed above. After we did this we had a lunch break and then we had another art history class at the church of San Clemente. This church was very interesting because if you start at the bottom of the church and work your way up, you are actually working your way up through the history of Rome. This was a great culminating activity for our art history lessons. I do have some feelings about the art history lessons. To start off Professor Paul Gwynne is a great and extremely intelligent man. He was able to describe to us in extreme detail about a lot of history in Rome. Here in lies the problem though; there was too much detail. The two and a half hour classes were a bit long and for those of us that are not really interested in history it tends to put us to sleep. Overall I feel like the art history classes are needed but maybe with less frequently or about a more specific time period so that way we don’t have to cover a few thousand years worth of history in five art history meetings. After we finished our last art history class we headed over to the council of ministers office in Rome. This was a very interesting visit because we were allowed to see many things that most people don’t get to see and in fact if we probably wouldn’t be able to see the equivalent of these offices in the United States. I found it to be a great pleasure to visit these offices that the ministers hold their meetings in and where they vote on government regulations but it has been a long day. The tour was a little longer than expected and because we have had so many long days it caused a lot of our group to become very cranky. It was kind of disappointing that we kind or ran out of the offices when the tour was done because I would of liked to see more. Nonetheless we left and I headed back to the hotel in order to get ready for tomorrow because we have an early start tomorrow. When I got back I had some pasta that a group of us made and after I finish this journal I’m going to head straight to bed.