After a week of hell, we had our final presentation of our five boards on Monday afternoon. I stayed up all night Sunday night, but it wasn't really as bad as other all nighters have been- I had all my stuff, I just wanted to do it right.
Monday morning we still had to go to history class, however, and our lovely british teacher walked us all over Roma- from the Pantheon to the Aria Pacis Museum by Richard Meier back to the Pantheon and a bunch of other places too. People fell asleep sitting on the side of the road listening to her lecture. Her class are actually really interesting, though. It's like being on a tour with a tour guide (which I always loved). We learn all the interesting stuff as we're actually looking at the subject. Everyone says its like being on the history channel.

Today we went to the national museum of Rome (I don't have the energy right now to write that in Italian). It was full of frescoes, mosaics, and statues from Roman villas. They were all very beautiful....however, the museum was a half hour walk from our apartment in freezing rain and hail....so I broke down and bought a Mcdonald's breakfast sandwich. But it didn't even have real bacon on it, it was canadian bacon. Ah well.

My favorite fact so far from her class is learning how the present Romans (and all those since Roman times) never really tear anything down, they just use it for their new buildings. A lot of piazzas and buildings in Rome have their particular shape because they built on the foundations of Roman theaters or basilicas. The word they use for this kind of translates to 'englobement.' They just surround the old building with the new, and use it as support. Part of our studio is the tower of the temple that was attached to the first permanent theater built in Rome. There is a curved apartment building behind studio that used the curved wall of the stadium seating in the theater, and the street slopes downward because it was built over the seating!

I don't really have a lot of pictures for this post, but I do have the scanned pictures of my presentation boards- an analysis of 4 famous sites in Rome, all handrawn. First here are the presentations on the wall.

Mine went horizontally but a lot of people drew theirs vertically.

And here they are: