History

As the decades of faith in Enlightenment reason gave way to the emotional backlash of the Romantics, Rome provided a context for many of the aims of the new generation: the balance between Classicism and Romanticism, between the ruins of civilization and the struggle for a new political order, between nature and the imagination, between the past and the future. Designed as an interdisciplinary exploration of these subjects as they manifested themselves in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rome, this course considers literature, music, art and philosophy as forces of innovation that helped shape the experience of social and cultural transformation. By visiting, seeing, reading and listening to the new styles of expression embodied by Romanticism, we explore the political issues central to the new aesthetic that inspired poets and patriots in Rome’s Revolution of 1848. Normally taught on location.