As my alarm went off at 8:15, I woke up from a much needed night of sleep to get ready to go down to breakfast. Breakfast was followed by another much needed nap until we met at 11:40 a.m. to head to the American University of Rome.
A walk up a lot of stairs and crossing across a few busy roads, we arrived to hear from Dr. Andrea Bini. There, he gave us a brief overview of the history of mass media in Italy and how it works today. Anywhere I go to work, I know it will be important to know the history of the media and the city to be able to work successfully.
From Camillo Benso to Silvio Berlusconi, Dr. Bini explained how politics, power and media have worked together to create what is the mass media in Italy. The government and people in power have been using the media to shape Italian people since Italy’s unification in 1861. In the WWII era, the implementation of radios in public spaces helped spread fascist propaganda. Since then, the media has changed a lot, but there is still bias in certain aspects of papers due to ownership by figureheads or money spent by large companies. This was interesting to hear from an Italian citizen and be able to get his take on the situation. We were also able to compare how it is similar to the media in our home country as well.
After Dr. Bini finished his lecture, we heard from someone from AUR’s student life office about the study abroad program since we have a partnership with the university. After that, we headed to a bus that took us to the colosseum.
Our guide, Matteo, handed us off to a new guide, Katja, who guided us through the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Roman Forum while giving us in-depth descriptions of many different aspects of the two places. Since I did my research paper on the colosseum before the trip, it was interesting to get more of a detailed history lesson than I was able to find online. My favorite part was the forum since I didn’t touch much on it in my paper.
After we finished the tour with Katja, we were given back to Matteo and our other guide Andrea who guided us to the public transportation we needed to take to get back to our hotel rooms.
Since the day was a bit rainy, my roommate Kelsey and I headed back to the room to get dried off and freshen up a bit before walking to dinner. We overshot the location where we went yesterday for dinner, but ended up finding a place to eat a little further down (get lost and find yourself, I guess!). I had my first legal drink, which was Merlot. Of course, we finished out the night with gelato and walked back home.
