Framing Rome: Tourists, Artists, and the Popular Imagination

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will explore the ways in which Rome has been envisioned by photographers and filmmakers from the early photography of 1850's to the digital culture of the contemporary period. Our main focus will be the tension between the touristic and artistic impulses that have shaped the visual culture of Rome across the past three centuries. How does Rome come to us already mediated? How do we envision our Rome out of that vast reservoir of images? We can begin to answer to those questions only by creating our own intersections between histories of visual culture, museum studies, urban theory, and digital critical studies.