Kent Masters Rome cohort in Ancient History and Archaeology visit Tivoli and beyond

“Just back from a tremendous (but exhausting!) week with our Rome MA Ancient History/Archaeology students for this year. On Thursday we arranged a minivan to take us all out of the city of Rome–which the students are expert in now!–and off to Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, a spectacular pleasure palace from the 2nd century AD. Since we were in Tivoli, though, it hardly made sense to miss the Villa D’Este: a grand Renaissance palace built by a cardinal and relative of the dukes of Ferrara in the 16th century. The gardens in particular were exquisite: the students were all awed at the fountains, and the spectacular view! After a day’s rest, on the Saturday we made the short and easy train journey to Ostia Antica, Rome’s ancient sea-port on the banks of the Tiber. We arrived around 10 and by 4:30 most of us were shattered. Fortunately a few soldiered on to see the Christian ruins and the synagogue by the Porta Marina; the rest of us headed to the café for a well-deserved drink in the sunshine. Here are a couple of snaps of us enjoying the blissful panorama from the Villa D’Este and admiring one of the largest and best-preserved mosaics in the ancient city of Ostia. We will definitely be going back to both next year!”

 (sent in by Dr Christopher Burden-Strevens  – Ancient History lecturer on our Rome MA programmes https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/classics/staff/burden-strevens.html)

 

Author:

Kent in Rome event – April 2018 at the British Ambassadors Residence

The University of Kent annual event celebrating our Rome Centre for Classical and Renaissance studies will take place this year on the 4 April at the British Ambassadors residence in the Villa Wolkonsky.

The schedule for the evening includes the European Innovation in Academia Awards and a lecture by Dr. Thomas Campbell. This will be our second European Innovation in Academia Awards. The Awards recognise individuals who have made a difference in higher education in Europe or North America and celebrate academic creativity and innovation.

Our guest lecturer, Dr Thomas P. Campbell, was Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 2008-2017. His academic specialism is the study of Renaissance tapestries and he will lecture on ‘Raphael’s Tapestry Designs for Pope Leo X and their legacy at the Court of Charles I’, taking the Mortlake tapestries based on Raphael’s Cartoons (three of which hang on the walls of the Villa Wolkonsky) as his starting point.

Dr. Campbell studied at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, before embarking on a career that has been dedicated to the preservation, study and promotion of cultural heritage. Having become interested in European tapestries while working on the art and propaganda of the European courts, he became a curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he was appointed Director and CEO of The Met in 2008. Serving for nine years as the ninth Director of the Met, Dr. Campbell pursued a ground-breaking agenda that combined scholarship with accessibility, and reimagined how a museum can engage with diverse, global audiences.  His focus was on simultaneously reinforcing the museum’s excellence in faculty, collections, galleries, exhibitions, publications and international engagement while ensuring its scholarship remains accessible, engaging and thought-provoking to a contemporary audience. He has recently stepped down from this position and is currently at the Getty Research Institute and at Waddesdon Manor in the UK as the Getty/Rothschild fellow 2017/18.

 

Author: