Reconnaissance

Today, after my finals were through, I met with a housemate of mine from last year, a third-year now in the college, who was in Rome this past fall for the same program I'm doing. We sat outside in the glorious weather Chicago is having right now and just talked for 45 minutes about the program and how it all works, and it really made me look forward to this fall even more. I learned a lot of useful tidbits and got a great sense of the scope of the program, which I'm going to list here to give everyone a sense of how things will work.

Housing
--We live in apartments in the Monteverde area, near Trastevere, which I believe is on the northwest (?) side of the city. They hold anywhere from 4 to 8 people or so and have 2-4 double bedrooms; you can pick your roommate but not your other apartment mates.
--The apartments are quite spacious (for Rome, anyway), and some have washing machines. There are no dryers because Italy (and Europe in general) does not do dryers.
--The apartments include a very small cooking area, but I think it's basically just a stovetop, with no oven. As a result, most people eat out a lot, which apparently is not as expensive as I had originally feared (it's still not cheap, however). My housemate said she spent about 100 euro a week on food, for 10 weeks, which is about 1000 euro ($1300-1400) for the entire quarter.
--Food and books, as well as flights there, are about all we pay for, however; we get free public transit cards for the Metropolitana (the subway, basically) in Rome as part of the program, and housing is part of the fee attached to our bursar bill
--The apartments are a 15- or 20-minute Metropolitana ride from where classes are, near the Pantheon. Interestingly, apparently even the cheap public transit trains (like the Metropolitana) are extremely fast and quiet, and not too shabby-looking either, a far cry from the slow, jerky, and loud CTA
--Sheets and the like are part of the housing deal, so we don't have to worry about bringing them out with us
--The apartments even include a weekly maid service. Win!

Program/Academics
--The program is one quarter, about ten weeks. We do not get a break in the middle like many other programs do, but we only have class Monday-Thursday, so every weekend is a long weekend.
--We take basically two classes: the civilization studies class we're there for in the first place, as well as a twice-a-week language class, depending on your prior experience with Italian. We get credited for 4 classes on our transcript, however, like a normal quarter: all three quarters of the "Rome: Antiquity to the Baroque" civ sequence as well as credit for the appropriate level of Italian
--Mondays-Thursdays we have civ for three hours a day, I think in the morning from about 9am to noon. Mondays and Wednesdays we also have language class for an hour or two in the afternoon, after a lunch break period. Thursdays are often "site visit" days, where we go to all different sorts of historical sites in the city, and so civ on those days actually is often less than 3 hours long.
--A few weeks into the program we take a long-weekend trip to Napoli, to a villa right on the Mediterranean, where we spend a few days looking at ruins and get 2 (apparently huge, classic Italian home-cooked) meals a day for free. It is apparently ungodly beautiful.

There were lots of stories of all sorts of varying appropriateness told, including stories about trips to Orvieto, to a wine festival just outside the city, to Firenze, and to Venezia, among others. Some people travel a lot, others don't; my housemate said her one big regret about the program was not traveling more while she was spending these ten weeks in such an amazing country. Traveling will be a bit expensive, but I'd really like to try it. I know people who will be in Prague, in Paris, and in London, among other places, and while I don't know that I'd get that far out, it sure sounds like tons of fun to try.

I'm now appropriately excited to really start getting this journey off the ground; it is going to be amazing, I know.