by Scott Anderson

The 2007 biannual Art in Italy Trip and Field Study was a great success.  This year the tour included fifteen students, two guests and two professors.  We left for Italy on May 6th and returned on June 1st, and made extended stays in Florence, Sienna, Rome and Venice taking in the art, architecture, sights, sounds, tastes and smells of Italy.

For fourteen days, home base for us was the La Romita Art School nestled in the hills above the city of Terni. La Romita is a 500 year-old monastery that has been converted into a place for artists and students to study and work in a charming and unique setting.

While at La Romita we made day trips to the surrounding hill towns in Umbria where there are many beautiful churches and significant art works to paint, draw and study. Our afternoons and evenings were spent in the studio (the converted chapel), finishing our drawings and paintings.

Upon return to Ball State, the students began working to complete a large project based on their Italian experiences, using the methods and techniques they explored on-site in Italy. The entire field study experience will culminate with an exhibition in the Atrium Gallery in the Art and Journalism building in January of 2008. The exhibition will feature the artwork made on-site and inspired from the Art in Italy trip.

Art in Italy was started by Marilynn Derwenskus more than 12 years ago and has continued to evolve and provide a unique immersive learning opportunity for Ball State art students.  This year, the trip featured a new wrinkle: we all became amateur bloggers, keeping a diary of our adventures online.  Many thanks to Dr. John Dailey of the Telecommunications department for his help with our blog!

This was my first year to participate in Art in Italy, and the experience left me speechless. As a painter, it was exhilarating to be in Italy, the birth place of the Renaissance and western art. People keep asking me what was the best or most important thing I saw; all I can say is, "Everything!" Was it the Sistine chapel, or the frescoes of Masaccio, Giotto, or Filippo Lippi, or perhaps the paintings of Titian, Botticelli, Caravaggio or Tintoretto? Maybe it was the Forum, the Pantheon, the Coliseum or the mosaics at San Clemente? Maybe it was the birds waking me up at La Romita through opened wooden shutters as the cool morning breeze came down the hill from the olive grove? No! The best thing was definitely everything.

For an in-depth account of Art in Italy 2007, visit our blog at artinitaly.iweb.bsu.edu.