By Ronald LeBlanc, professor of Russian & humanities

As I mentioned in my previous report, the town where the UNH-in-Italy study abroad program is located lies well off the beaten tourist path. Nonetheless, Ascoli Piceno is situated only some thirty kilometers away from the Adriatic coast.

Thus it lies in close proximity to the main north-south rail line that runs the length of the country and, as a result, our students have been able to travel fairly easily to other interesting locales in Italy. A few weeks ago, for instance, several of them travelled by train to Venice for a long weekend (classes are held from Monday through Thursday, so every weekend turns out to be a long one).

Others have ventured by train to a more remote destination: the five picturesque seaside villages in northwestern Italy, known collectively as the Cinque Terre (Five Lands), which cling to steep cliffs high above the Mediterranean seashore below. My wife (Lynda) and I, meanwhile, have used the trains to travel to such artistically and culturally rich Tuscan cities as Siena and Florence over a three-day weekend.

In addition, the UNH-in-Italy program each semester organizes a number of academic field trips that involve travel. In mid-September, for example, we took the students on a six-day field trip to the western coast of Sicily.

We were accompanied by instructor Christina Danielli, the program’s resident expert on Italian art and architecture, and chauffeured by Cristian Muscelli, the program’s Administrative Director, who skilfully navigated our rented van through narrow passageways and around crazy Sicilian drivers.

Our students visited such important historical sites as the 8th-century (B.C.) Phoenician ruins on the island of Mozia, the ancient Greek temple at Selinunte, the ancient Greek amphitheatre at Segesta, the medieval Christian churches at the mountain-top village of Erice, and the quasi-Byzantine cathedral at Montreale (where I was astounded to find vendors near the church entrance selling icon cases that contained copies of well-known works – such as the famous Trinity icon – created by Russia’s most famous icon painter, Andrei Rublev). Byzantine and Arabic influences were particularly in evidence at the churches and palaces we visited in Palermo, where the field trip concluded with a two-day stop.

Another field trip, this time to Rome, the country’s beautiful “citta eterna” (eternal city), took place just last week. The itinerary included not only a walking tour of some of the archaeological remnants of ancient Roman civilization located on the Capitoline and Palatine hills (including the Colosseum), but also guided museum visits to the Musei Capitolini and the Galleria Borghese, where such masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art as Bernini’s “Apollo and Daphne”, Caravaggio’s “David with the Head of Goliath”, Raphael’s “Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn”, Titian’s “Sacred Love and Profane Love” and Correggio’s “Danae” are on display.

The primary objective of these academic field trips is, of course, to provide our students with first-hand experience of sites in Italy that have a rich cultural, historical, and/or artistic heritage. As a faculty member who teaches in the UNH Humanities Program, it was especially gratifying for me to see our students being exposed to great works of art that are likely to prompt them to ponder the central (and universal) question posed in the Humanities: namely, what does it mean to be a human being?

It was Thoreau, if I am not mistaken, who advised that each of us should attempt to live like tourists in our own hometown, remaining curious and open to exploration (and the thrill of discovery) even when we find ourselves within the most familiar of surroundings.

Most of us, however, are apt to explore those points of interest that lie in close proximity to our homes only when visitors come to town. This has certainly proven to be the case for Lynda and me here in our adopted Italian hometown of Ascoli Piceno.

It seems that we have been kept so busy by our daily routine during weekdays (preparing and teaching classes, receiving Italian language instruction, completing administrative tasks at the program office, shopping daily for food, running errands, etc.), and by travel to other parts of Italy during weekends, that we have tended to explore the local attractions in Ascoli and the surrounding area mainly when guests have come to town to visit us.

When two different sets of friends came to see us during October (one from London, the other from Washington, D.C.), we found ourselves not only showing our guests Ascoli’s two main town squares, Piazza del Popolo and Piazza Arringo, where we stop almost every day for a cup of cappuccino or glass of red wine (depending upon the time of day), but also venturing at last inside some of the magnificent medieval churches and Renaissance palazzos that border these squares.

Stopping in with our guests at the Duomo (Cathedral) at the far end of Piazza Arringo, for instance, enabled us to see some of the beautiful frescos painted by the famous Carlo Crivelli (1430-1495) as well as the more contemporary yet highly poignant mosaic that pays tribute to the courage of convictions shown by a number of intrepid thinkers and activists who suffered for their religious beliefs under 20th-century totalitarian regimes (these modern martyrs include, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pavel Florensky, and Oscar Romero).

At the Chiesa di San Francesco (Church of St. Francis) on Piazza del Popolo, meanwhile, we got to see a stained-glassed window that memorializes Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Along with the remains of a 1st-century (B.C.) Roman amphitheatre, a 16th-century public lavatory, and a former Papal paper mill, the interiors of these two churches were just a few of the several edifying attractions in the town of Ascoli that we might not otherwise have visited (and thus would have inadvertently overlooked) had we not been compelled to become, at least for a few days, “tourists” in our own hometown. Travel can indeed teach us much, but so too can more careful observation of treasures that seem to lie hidden in plain view. A presto!