Ancient Studies 301:  Ancient Civilizations

Southern Italy and Sicily, March 2000
The wonders of the ancient Greco-Romans in southern Italy and Sicily, the flavors of modern southern Italian food, and all the sites came alive from Pompeii to Paestum.
The Ancient Studies Department’s 2000 trip to southern Italy and Sicily departed late Friday, March 17, 2000, from  Dulles and flew to Rome, then continued immediately via private bus to southern Italy.
Our destinations on the mainland included Pompeii, Mt. Vesuvius, Herculaneum, the Archaeological Museum of Naples, the San Gennaro catacombs, and Paestum.  We took an overnight ferry boat to Sicily where we toured for three more days, visiting Palermo, Monreale, Agrigento, Siracusa and Taormina.   We flew home from Sicily, via Rome, and arrived Saturday, March 25, 2000, laden with presents, impressions, and wonderful souvenirs of cultures from the past and their descendants in the present.  Many of us are already thinking of returning in the near future.
 

Tour Leaders
Marilyn Goldberg                       Robert Rivkin
 
 
 
 
 

UMBC Department of Ancient Studies
 
 

 

Academic  Credit

Many of our 35 travelers decided to take Ancient Studies 301 for academic credit.  During the winter and spring sessions several pre-trip meetings were held at UMBC, where Professors Marilyn Goldberg, Robert Rivkin , and guest lecturer Professor Jim McKusick spoke about the sites we were to visit and the cultures that settled them; assigned and discussed readings associated with these sites and cultures; gave useful Italian language lessons; and supplied practical travel tips.
Interest among the enthusiastic UMBC  tourists/photographers/seasoned travelers and their co-leaders was so overwhelmingly in favor of it, that, instead of administering a traditional exam to assign a grade, Professors Goldberg and Rivkin decided to invite all the participants to build this web page and its links to individuals' web pages to show what they saw and how they interpreted what they saw based on the lectures, the readings, and their on-site visits.  All the pictures are their own

Thoughts and Reactions from Some of Our Travelers

Click on the thumbnails below to see original photos and texts about our March 2000 adventure into southern Italy and Sicily.