The Muse Rediscovered: Imagine that we are in the late 1920s and in various parts of Rome they excavate to free important archeological ruins from the successive layers of building. It is in one of these excavations that the life-size marble statue of a wonderful figure of a pensive woman comes to light. The statue is in an optimal state of preservation, and even the polish of the marble appears almost intact. It is precisely this condition that makes some historians maintain that, as one of the many wars or military crises of the late antique period was probably immanent, the work was intentionally placed by a friendly hand in the underground niche in which it was found. It is a gesture of love and respect for art by an unknown man or woman who wanted the figure to survive and outlive them, a figure to them rich with profound meaning and value.

The figure is decisively fascinating, it is standing, leaning quietly with the right elbow on a sort of balustrade, stretching its gaze out ahead toward the distant horizon. The slightly chubby face, the large and intense eyes, the fleshy lips, and broken nose (from its nearly 1900 years of life), give the figure a melancholy and somewhat enigmatic expression. And if that were not enough, its body from the neck down, is wrapped in a soft mantel that falls around the figure in infinite folds, leaving free only the left hand in the act of offering its secret on a piece of parchment, held out to he who knows how to approach cautiously. The figure clearly comes from far away but it is from her far distant place of silence that her eyes illuminate us and enrich our understanding and living.

Today we know that the sculpture represents Polimnia, one of the nine famous muses of antiquity, one of the sacred divinities that inspired the poets, dancers, actors, philosophers, and historians. It was they who poured into the words of men the sacred flame of art, the living feeling capable of making dance, narrative, philosophy, and history rich with humanity. It was their inspiration that filled the techniques, the theories, and the verses with that human intensity and with that vital warmth that make profound impressions on the minds and hearts of those who see the art, listen to the music, or read the narratives.

The Proposal: With this we introduce our seminars on history and art, because it is this type of intense experience of the mind and heart that we want to invite you to join. We propose four seminars with different subjects and content but similar in the fact of being two days full immersion in a crucial period of history and art history for Rome. Each is designed for the discovery, comprehension, and full experience of the mode of thinking and living of the time, of the religions and the institutions, of the politics and the society. Through the surviving artworks, the manufactures, and the textual sources, we will try to gather the mentality of the people of other times, their myths, their rituals, their sense of reality, their religion, etc. Today, for example, we give great credibility to information that is presented on a screen, we believe that reality can be expressed in a television show, while in the middle ages they believed miracles and apparitions of saints to be real and widespread. The Romans believed that the will of the gods was real and intelligible through the examination of the flight of birds or of the entrails of the sacrificed animals. Similarly, every epoch has a certain sense of time, a certain sense of how it unfolds, a series of rites for celebrating the fundamental stages of life and the epilog of death, and above all in every era the lives of men and women take form around a series of values, habits, and hierarchies that the prevailing powers and traditions define and which come to be respected as absolutes, as the norm, and that which we have always taken for granted.  

Fortunately there are periods of fertile cultural liberation in which everything is cast up for discussion and new modes of feeling, living, and relating spread throughout society. Important examples include the era of Classical Greece with its immortal philosophers and artists, its counterpart in ancient Rome, and the Italian Renaissance that reshapes cities and above all creates new men with a new broader consciousness of themselves and of their resources and possibilities.

Each one of our seminars covers a certain period of time and the great changes occurring during that period, culminating with the narrative of one emblematic day, in which something memorable occurred for successive generations, and about which the details were passed from father to son for years. Describing for you the social context of the time, we will transport ourselves there to encounter the feelings of these forbearers, and to share their dreams and ideals. With a clear educational intent, we propose this approach to specific moments of Roman history, accompanying you for two days through the most beautiful areas of Rome but also the most secret, tranquil, and exclusive. Like a great academy under the stars of the past, our docents will fascinate you like ancient philosophers with discussions of art and history. From the Palatine Hill to the medieval cloister of the church of San Lorenzo Outside -the -Walls, from the cloister of Bramante to the Basilica of Santa Sabina, Rome and its infinite beauty will be place to live intensely for two days, to comprehend and to experience a past society.

Our seminars:

1. Archeological Rome: From the foundation of the city to the assassination of Julius Caesar. Myths, rituals, economic and cultural development in an expanding city
   
   
2. Imperial Rome: From the assassination of Julius Cesar to the age of Constantine.  The multiethnic and multicultural metropolis in an empire at its apogee
   
   
3. Medieval Rome: From Constantine to the first Jubilee in 1300. The fall of the empire, the changes in the city, new medieval institutions between faith, papacy, and empire
   
   
4. Renaissance Rome: From the return of the popes to the city to the new Basilica of St. Peter. Liberalization of art and society in Italian cities

Each seminar will have about three hours dedicated to actual introduction to the history and art of the era, and about five hours per day dedicated to the discovery and the direct and creative experience of the historical and artistic content being explored, whether that is frescoes, coins, temples, statues, or other artifacts.

Certain themes will be pursued in each of these voyages:

1. The way reality was defined(or what reality was)
2. Religion and myth
3. Political institutions and forms of power
4. Divine law and man's law
5. The perception of time and its measurement
6. Sacred and profane art
7. Funeral rites and the vision of the beyond.

In each seminar a series of objectives will also be pursued:

1. To draw your attention to, and facilitate the reading of, visual elements that are readily once you have the proper tools. For instance, the friezes on a palace, or the form and inscription of a temple present traces of history there to be read. We will find such things as the name of a consul written on the cornice of a temple dedicated to the god who protects the city and favors the consul. Similarly, a cardinal represented next to the Virgin and placed above other mortals visually validates his dominant role, or the recognizably human faces of Renaissance angels reflects the new importance of the individual in society and the new consciousness with which man relates to the world and even to God.
2. Comprehension will have a central role because our societies are the fruit of centuries of history, centuries of exchange, invention and enrichment that still imprint the geometry and the furnishings of our homes, the forms of our institutions, everything from Christian sacraments and the scientific method to our clothing and the social acceptability of kissing in public represent our inheritance from these centuries of history.
3. To experience art, to comprehend the language of art and to be predisposed to participate in that knowledge and feeling that only art can communicate. Because art puts us in contact, in a profound and inexplicable manner, with men of the past it is worth analyzing to the best of our ability how color, line, volume, and etc work as a language and how that language has been used and understood historically.

We want to conclude by returning to the Muses: In the Fedro Plato describes to Socrates the inspiration that the muses give to the poets. "He who arrives at poetry without the madness that comes from the Muses, convinced of being a good poet thanks only to technique, will fail: the poetry of the wise man will be overshadowed by the poetry of the madman." The folly that Plato refers to is the artist who knows the techniques and the language of art, the history of poetry, but at the same time knows how to keep his ear tuned to the secret and distant voices of the muses. The word enthusiasm in Greek means to make oneself united with divinity, the participation in the divine for fully living our humanity. We invite you to this enthusiastic voyage of two infinite days in Rome, in search of the forgotten Muses.