Renee Arlotti, Pitt in Florence Summer 2023
In Florence, the classes I chose to take were ‘Italian Renaissance Art History’ and ‘Writing the City’, a creative writing class. My first takeaway about the classes I took was how interactive they were. My art history class had 14 students and my creative writing had six, which provided me with a completely different learning experience than I could get at Pitt, sitting through lectures with 300 other students. In my creative writing class, after every assignment, each student would read their work to the class, and everyone else would offer suggestions for improvement. It would be difficult for everyone to receive thorough feedback in a class of 20, which is considered a small class at Pitt. The small class size made it easy to interact with, and subsequently get to know, my peers and participate in class discussions, increasing my attention span and minimizing the work I had to do outside of class. Before my trip, everyone I talked to warned me about the workload of a six-week class, but it was not unreasonable or unmanageable. I still had plenty of time to enjoy the city I was residing in, as well as other parts of the country. My learning experience was also enriched by the subject matter taught in my classes. Florence is considered the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance, so much of what I was taught in my art history class took place locally. Half of the three-hour class would be spent learning about artists and their works, and the rest would be spent on site, witnessing, in person, the art we learned about in class. Over six weeks, we visited eight churches, three museums, and Florence’s town hall, Palazzo Vecchio. I never would have considered visiting all eight churches in my own time if I had to pay out-of-pocket for the entrance fee. The class provided me with opportunities that I would have otherwise missed out on and not have known I would appreciate nearly as much as I did. One of my favorite site visits was to San Marco, where I got to see Fra Angelico’s ‘The Annunciation’. Coincidentally, I had already been familiar with this piece from my creative writing class, where we had an assignment to write a dialogue inspired by the story of the annunciation. However, merely seeing a picture could never do the painting justice. Without witnessing it in person, I never would have known that Angelico used crushed marble and seashells on Gabriel’s wings to make them sparkle. I also loved our visit to Santa Croce, the church in which Galileo and Michelangelo are buried. The tombs are among others around the church, and are inscribed in Latin, so I did not know what I was looking at until my professor explained. The subject matter taught in class was extremely interesting, which made learning more enjoyable and making connections while studying easier.
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