Rome via Brooklyn

Word Count: 745 words

Time to Read: 3-5 minutes

Today we went to the American Academy In Rome. My roommates, Fannie, Dakota, Lucy and Arden met up with the lovely Shamiqua to take a taxi up the much dreaded hill. Split six ways it only ran us about 5 dollars USD!

Today the goal was to meet with a curator at the American Academy In Rome and we would then be provided with the once in a lifetime opportunity to get to handle some antiquities!

Lucy and I took photos of one another near the fountain by the entrance whilst we innocently awaited our future plans to handle the antiquities with the group.

Once everyone in our group arrived and we waited a little while more the most terrible news came upon our doorsteps.

We would not be handling any antiquities and the curator was not even there.

I felt an immense wave of sadness and great disappointment, when signing up for this trip and hearing things from friends this was one of the opportunities this trip provides that I was looking forward to the most.

Professor Yarrow did not give up and although this was a last minute mishap, something that was out of all our hands she tried to advocate for us and make sure we still got something out of our trek and this trip to the AAR.

And so she worked her magic and we got to tour some of the grounds, learn some of the history of the AAR and got the chance to look at, sadly not handle, some books in the rare book collection.

Pictured above is the very kind Sebastian showing us pages from a real-life medieval illuminated manuscript.

The history was not in our hands, but in the hands of Sebastian, lucky for him, not so lucky for us.

I was still grateful though as being on these grounds and getting to walk around and bear witness to a place where so much scholarship and creativity occur felt electric.

Today I was faced with a contradiction, something that I have experienced a lot whilst on this trip.

On a day where the usually inaccessible was supposed to have been made accessible (the antiquities) a wall (due to the fault of no one) still remained up.

There was still a barrier in the way of my classmates and I’s access to the premodern and through the reading for today’s class I learned some of the ways Academies in general feed and are a part of this system of lack of access.

The reading by Frederick Whitling states, “overall assessments of the foreign schools will possibly be shaped by the scope and boundaries of scholarship that they promote and produce. They also function as gatekeepers of the above-mentioned scholarly disciplines.” (pg. 550)

The different disciplines he is referencing consist of the studies of “traditional elds of classical
studies, the arts, and philology, as well as for history, anthropology, modern linguistics, political science, classical reception studies, among others.” (pg. 550)

Although these schools open lots of doors for those who are a part of them the hard part happens when it comes time for deciding who gets to go through that door.

It is in that way that Academies are selecting and limiting access to the general public whilst enriching the lives of their fellows or researchers with their resources; those people will get to add to the pot of food that other people will then consume but the knowledge has to go through this intense and restrictive strainer first.

The institutions and their residents are heavily filtered and specifically picked out, it is inherently an exclusionary system, but the fruits of this system, the results that come out of going through this ends up giving us as a people so much insight into the classical and into the premodern.

It is almost hard to reckon with the multifaceted-ness of it all, as how do we critique and complain about a system that has still given us so much?

Although I did not get to handle objects I still got my perspective challenged and that is most valuable in helping me to develop and to grow.

To conclude this post I will share images from the AAR and its beautiful grounds.

I am so thankful for this experience and the ways it keeps pushing me to expand my mindset.

-Paola ❤