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In Search of Beauty:
SATA Florence Spring 2007
Courses | Excursions/Special Events | About the Program Directors
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Piazza Signoria in Florence. |
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Do you want to see more pictures? View the SATA Florence Photo Gallery! |
Florence has been called "the city that art built." SATA Florence offers a first-hand experience of the birth of Renaissance beauty in Florence. Fieldtrips to Venice, Rome, and Perugia will complement the experience of Florence by studying the spread of the Renaissance to other Italian cities.
Florence is also the birthplace of the Italian language, which came into being in the early Renaissance in the writings of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the "three crowns of Florence." Whether interested in learning Italian for the first time, or in perfecting the Italian already studied, Florence is a good place for students to be.
SATA Florence will be hosted by the Institute of the Fine and Liberal Arts at Palazzo Rucellai, in the center of Florence. Palazzo Rucellai, designed by the Leon Battista Alberti, a Renaissance writer and architect, is one of the most beautiful buildings in Florence. Its façade is often highlighted in textbooks as the epitome of the Renaissance's attempt to recover the beauty of classical harmony and proportion. Some of its classrooms have frescoed ceilings.
Students will live in apartments within walking distance of Palazzo Rucellai. Palazzo Rucellai offers courses in a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. See the course listing on its web site: www.palazzorucellai.net
Courses | Excursions/ Special Events | Background of Program Directors
All SATA students will take Professor Proctor's course
In Search of Beauty: A discussion of the Renaissance's understanding of beauty and its relationship to love and to truth. Readings of Italian Renaissance authors combined with on-site study of architecture, painting, and sculpture in Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance.
Professor Proctor will also offer a course in English on Dante's Divine Comedy. He will be accompanied by his wife, the artist Martha Wakeman, www. marthawakeman.com. At Palazzo Rucellai she will offer Pastel Drawing: Florentine Cityscapes and Tuscan Landscapes.
Fieldtrips to Venice, Rome, and Perugia for SATA Florence students will complement the experience of Florence by studying the spread of the Renaissance to other Italian cities.
Further, by chance, a unique Italian experience will be available to SATA Florence 2007 students. On the three-day weekend of March 15 - 17, Professor Proctor and his wife will be in Sestri Levante, one of the beautiful resort towns on the Italian Riviera south of Genova, where he will speak at a conference on classical culture in the modern world. Italian university professors and high school teachers will attend this conference, and bring some of their students with them. The organizers have invited Professor Proctor to bring his SATA students. Those who are interested can travel to Sestri Levante with Professor Proctor to spend a weekend in a completely Italian setting with Italian students their own age.
Background of the Program Directors
Professors Proctor and Wakeman are both fluent in Italian and know Florence well. After she graduated from college, Martha Wakeman earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Florence and lived there for ten years. Professor Proctor spent his junior year in Florence and lived there in 1974 - 75 as a Fellow of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. Professors Wakeman and Proctor have many Italian friends and acquaintances in Florence through whom they hope to provide SATA Florence students with special opportunities for entering into Florentine life. Professors Proctor and Wakeman have also lived in Rome, Venice, and Perugia, and are eager to share these cities with SATA students.
Professor Proctor is Joanne Toor Cummings '50 Professor of Italian at Connecticut College, where he has also served as Provost and Dean of the Faculty, and as Founding Director of the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts. He is the author of Education's Great Amnesia: Reconsidering the Humanities from Petrarch to Freud, with a Curriculum for Today's Students (Indiana University Press, 1988), for which he won the Association of American Colleges' Frederic W. Ness Book Award in 1990, given annually to the author of the book that contributes most to the understanding of liberal learning. A second paperback edition of the book appeared in 1998 with the new title Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our Schools. He is now writing a book on The Roman Origins of the Liberal Arts Tradition.
Contact Professor Robert Proctor