20 October 2011 - Rome like Venice?

On October 20th, Rome was thrown into disarray due to the heavy rain since the early hours of the day, resulting in widespread flooding across the city.

At the height of rush hour many pedestrians found the capital's streets virtually impassable, with large amounts of people opting to take shelter in doorways. People walk past a paddle next to Rome's ancient Colosseum and near the most famous monuments.

Most of Pantheon Institute staff could not reach the center of the city and had to come back home; the school was strangely empty and classes were cancelled.

Trees were felled, subways were flooded and some roads crumbled. Private schools in Rome urged parents to keep their children home for the day, saying classrooms were flooded and roads near schools impassable.

Rome's agency for mobility reports that the many Metro A stations were closed due to flooding and some bus routes were diverted, in particular the northern periphery services.

Hours after the rain stopped, cars remained trapped in massive traffic jams on the outskirts of the city.

The mayor of Rome called for a state of emergency Thursday after a heavy storm caused flooding, traffic delays and the death of an elderly man."The intensity of the storm was unexpected," said Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, who also activated a toll-free emergency hotline for people to report emergencies and request information.

Looking at the impressive pictures taken during that uncommon day, we hope not to repeat that experience again!!

Discover Italy... and taste it!!

Nothing says Italy like its food, and nothing says Italian food like pasta!

Pasta's origins are very ancient. It's said that they go back to the Etruscans, they used to prepare the first lasagna made of spelt (a kind of cereal like wheat, but far more resistant against bad weather and diseases). Later on, the Romans used to make a very simple dough with water and flour from which they made a kind of lasagna.

In Italy one can find pasta in a great variety of shapes and with many different types of sauces, furthermore you should consider also that each shape of pasta is typically matched with a particular sauce based on constincency and its ability to hold sauce.

There are several kinds of pasta, it seems to be 350 different shapes, even more counting regional differences. Shapes range from simple tubes to bow ties (farfalle, which actually means "butterfly"), to unique shapes like tennis rackets (racchette). Moreover pasta can be found in dried (pasta secca) and fresh (pasta fresca) varieties.

For Italian people it is very important that pasta is al dente, means literally “to the tooth” that is cooked so as to be firm but not hard.
It is estimated that Italians eat over sixty pounds of pasta per person, per year easily beating Americans, who eat about twenty pounds per person.

Considering the importance that Italians give to pasta, we decided that the prize for the winner of the September photo competition “Ancient and Modern in Rome” should have been a basket with a great variety of pasta: truffle pasta, paccheri, black sepia pasta, lemon pasta and chitarrine all’uovo. Congratulations to Daniel who was the winner!!! Have a look at his beautiful picture and at all the other photos on our website photopage.

Survival Italian

This semester we tried something new: four classes of survival Italian, a nice occasion to learn a bit of this rich and beautiful language and to practice it while going out all together. At the beginning we started with grammatics, and some of the basic vocabulary concerning how to get food, how to ask for information, while at the post office and while doing shopping. Besides, we spent some time on the outside, going to the supermarket, to the tabacconist, eating in Roman pizzerias and ice-cream shops. The guys practiced their Italian in different contexts and were very proud of their results!

All in all, it was a very nice experience and a beautiful occasion not only to explore the Italian language, but also to get to know the Italian culture through direct experience.

Summer starts at the Pantheon Institute

The first session of the Summer program at the Pantheon Institute has started only one week ago but all the students are already very busy with the different academic activities scheduled for them.
The students arrived on Monday, May 9th and they were welcomed at the Santa Maria in Cappella residence in Trastevere by the housing staff. The dorm offers a very unique space, especially in this season, as its garden is in bloom and full of beautiful roses and fruit trees.
On the following day, Tuesday May 10th, the students gathered at the studio of Via della Gatta for the orientation meetings. After Romolo Martemucci, the Pantheon Institute Director, presented the program and the staff to the students, each of them received a cell phone and then headed off to see the students services office in Via del Pantheon as well.
Classes started on Wednesday. Each group of students, the Architectural Engineering, the International Program in Nutrition and the Human Development and Family Studies ones, met their professors and had class in one of the facilities provided by the Pantheon Institute.
Wednesday was also the day we chose to organize the first of the extra-curricular activities we will be offering during the first Summer session. As a matter of fact, together with Professor Cheryl Cheek, we arranged a tour of the Testaccio market and a cooking class for the HDFS program students.
The tour of the market was very interesting. The students were divided into small groups and each of them had to buy some of the ingredients we then used to prepare our lunch.
This visit was also a great occasion to know and get to talk with some of the dealers who proved to be very kind and even let some of the students go inside their stand so that they could really immerse themselves in the true atmosphere of the market!
The cooking class took place at the Santa Maria in Cappella residence and all of the 18 students actively helped out to prepare the classical menu we propose for this activity: rigatoni alla carbonara, valerian salad with pears, Parmesan cheese and walnuts and tiramisu. Our lunch was delicious, as always, and the students really enjoyed this experience.
This was only the first of the activities that the Pantheon Institute staff will organize for its students throughout the Summer session I: among the others, we will arrange a movie night, a soccer match and some Survival Italian classes with Alessia, our intern from Roma Tre.
We really hope the students will participate with interest and enthusiasm in our extracurricular activities!

Spring 2011 Thorp Prize winners announced!

The Spring 2011 Thorp Prize gave outstanding results. The Penn State Architecture and Landscape Architecture students were asked to design a temporary installation celebrating the 150th anniversary of the creation of the Italian Nation which occurred in 1861 thanks to the political and military action of such visionaries as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini and Camillo Benso Count of Cavour. The installation was to be placed in an area spanning from Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum and the students were asked to carefully analyze the urban characteristics of the sites they chose and produce projects with a strong urban connotation and an evocative, symbolic impact, regardless of their ephemeral character. Student work involved research concerning both the history of Italian re-unification and examples of urban scale installations from past and present times. As already mentioned the quality of the seventeen entries was generally very high and this made the job of the jury particularly difficult. In fact, the jurors, Professors Luca Peralta, Romolo Martemucci and David Sabatello had to go through three distinct evaluation phases which brought to an initial eight-project shortlist from which the four finalists were chosen and subsequently the two winning entries were nominated unanimously. The winners were proclaimed during the traditional end-of-semester reception coinciding with the exhibit of student work at the Pantheon Institute.

The Spring 2011 Thorp Prize winners are:

TEAM 2: Zack Baier (Landscape Architecture); Colleen McDonough (Architecture); Lauren Polacheck (Architecture)

TEAM 13: Ben Mahan (Architecture); Kaylynn Primerano (Landscape Architecture)

Professor David Sabatello

Photo of the Month - April 2011

Here is the winning picture of the last photo competition for the Spring 2011 semester:

The theme of the contest was "Goodbye Italy" and Molly Ravis sent us a nice picture taken during the visit that the students from the "Masters and Monuments" class made to the "3D Rewind Roma", an exhilarating 3 dimensional journey through the history of imperial Rome. Thanks to a series of amazing special effects and the use of automated scenographic equipment, our students had the chance to find themselves in the underground chambers of the Colosseum back in 310 AD.

Molly won a huge and yummy chocolate Easter egg! But the Pantheon Institute has decided to give a small present to all the students who participated in our photo contest to thank them for their great enthusiasm!

Olive Oil Tasting at the Pantheon Institute!

The last extra-curricular activity that we organized for the Spring2011 students at the Pantheon Institute was an extra-virgin olive oil tasting.

We contacted a real expert in the field, Mr. Luca Mattioli, who came to the Pantheon office on Thursday afternoon to teach the students how to taste olive oil and how to distinguish a good product from a bad one.

Mr. Mattioli started his lesson with a little general information about olive oil: he said that “like wine, virgin olive oil has distinct flavors and signs of the territory of origin. Italy, having its head in central Europe, its feet in the Mediterranean and its belly somewhere in between, is blessed with a varied climate. Volcanic rock, marine salt, truffles and mushrooms, herbs and spices, fruit and vegetables, all join in with the help of father Sun to create the many different flavors of olive oils”.

This is why it is essential to discover how to taste the differences between olive oils and how to recognize their main qualities (i.e. sweetness, fruitiness, smoothness, softness…) and their main defects (i.e. rancidity, weakness, dryness…).

As for wines, also the tasting of extra-virgin olive oils entails the use of three of our sensory systems: vision, olfaction and taste.

Obviously, as Mr. Mattioli explained, the mouth tasting is the “classical and most complete method to value an olive oil and finally draw a conclusion after the visual and flavor tests”. The olive oil sommelier also gave our students some suggestions on how to match olive oils that are produced in different regions of Italy with the appropriate food.

We hope that our students enjoyed this experience and we will certainly organize this interesting activity again in the future!