Notre Dame Rome, along with partners from across the University of Notre Dame campus, has launched the Rome Book Club, an open, multimedia, educational enrichment program featuring Notre Dame’s expert faculty. Relevant themes will be selected, and participants will be invited to join four weekly meetings to discuss books, excerpts, films, and other materials.
Themes
Primo Levi’s The Truce: A Guide to Returning to Life
The fourth series with the Rome Book Club will guide you through the pages of Primo Levi’s work, The Truce, guided by Professor Barry McCrea, Professor of English, Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies, Concurrent Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Concurrent Professor of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame.
Raphael’s School of Athens: The Medium and the Message
The School of Athens, Raphael’s fresco of ancient philosophers under a vaulted hall, is one of the most famous and influential paintings of the Renaissance. It is both a brilliant articulation of philosophical systems and a sophisticated display of fresco technique. Understanding how medium and message were intertwined in Raphael’s world will open up a window onto the culture of the High Renaissance, where artistic craft and humanist thought went hand in hand.
Lenten Music through the Ages
The second series of the Rome Book Club invites you into the world of sacred music and how the artistic, religious, and intellectual communities in Rome helped to cultivate one of the most creative environments for the development of sacred music in history. In this series, we’ll begin with the historical context that led to this sustained creative period, with a focus on Gregorian Chant, Renaissance Polyphony, and the sacred music forms that developed out of chant and polyphony in the 17th and 18th centuries. We’ll discuss the myriad cultural forces that contributed to a deepening and broadening of religious devotion and sacred music practice. Finally, during Holy Week, the Notre Dame Folk Choir will host a creative workshop on its newest project centered around the Passion.
A Hell of a City: Dante's Inferno on the Road to Rome
The first series of the Rome Book Club is a guide to a few iconic moments in the Inferno (Hell), the first part of the Divine Comedy written by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) to recount a pilgrimage he made through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in the year 1300 on a quest for salvation.