Terry and I had to love this answer to our midterm question, “Describe Doge Lodovico Manin’s reaction to Napoleon’s arrival in Venice”:

He’s shorter than I thought.

If only we gave out points for creativity….

Terry and I have been going back and forth on how much of the syllabus and material we should post here, on the blog, versus in the university’s Blackboard website. If you’ve noticed the syllabus page(s) changing, that’s why!

Blogs and Blackboard are good for very different things. Blogs are great for this kind of transparent discussion and for making material and information available to anonymous visitors. Blackboard, on the other hand, is great for quick, non-chatty information organization and dissemination.

The advantage of posting material here on the blog is that it becomes available to students, parents, and other scholars who may want to preview the class. The disadvantage is that it’s a bit more difficult to update and organize, and materials posted to a public blog must all be copyright-free, or at least copylefted.

The advantage of posting material to Blackboard is that it’s very easy to update and rearrange information, and  we can post copyrighted articles and images available for educational use under access-limited conditions but inappropriate for publication on a public site.  The disadvantage, of course, is that anyone who isn’t enrolled in the class can’t see it.

We love technology, but sometimes it’s a challenge deciding which technology is best for any given purpose. The trick is to figure out how these two content-management sites can be used to complement each other, rather than duplicate each other.

Another  technology that both Terry and I feel very enthusiastic about is the iPad. I just received mine, and while it’s not the perfect travel-prof’s companion yet — it needs to be able to accept camera memory cards first — it’s definitely going to be useful on the road.  We plan to download travel books, language dictionaries, and itineraries to it that we can consult as needed as we walk through the city. We also plan to store a large selection of art on it so that we can take students to, say, look out at San Giorgio Maggiore or La Salute and simultaneously show them all the famous paintings and photographs taken of the same scene over the last century. I’d also like to store a handful of video clips on it so that, for example, we can stand in front of the restored Santa Maria dei Miracoli and compare it to what it looked like when Donald Sutherland ran past it in Don’t Look Now.  One note — since Venice isn’t built for signal reception (it has thick stone walls everywhere!), we expect to be limited to material we can download to the iPad, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case in other cities.

(Image courtesy of Apple PR)

Dru's Fantasy City of Saldon

Confession time: I grew up playing and running Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, I was About.Com’s Guide to Roleplaying Games for a number of years, and I still manage to make it out to a tabletop AD&D game once a month. At one point I had an extensively developed personal campaign world, Samru, in which I set complex campaigns for over fifteen years.

This image is a very tiny version of a very old map I drew of the fantasy city Saldon. Saldon was the setting for a novel I was writing while I was in high school and then turned into a city setting for a roleplaying campaign.

Not surprisingly, considering that I was living in Naples while I was in high school writing about Saldon, it’s an amalgam of two Italian cities that left a distinct impression on my teenage imagination: Capri and Venice. Saldon is a terraced, closely built-up city on an island (akin to Capri), in which one of the terraces has collapsed and now consists of canals running through crumbling old buildings (the Venetian influence). The “sunken” terrace was, in my writing and roleplaying, a haunt for the rejected parts of society: the impoverished, the outcasts, and the anti-authoritarian.

One of the challenges facing me as I develop this class is the same one that we’ll be posing to our students — to define Venice as a personal symbol. As I contemplate what Venice means to me, I realize how long and in how many ways it’s had an influence on my own imagination. I lived in Italy from ages 15 to 18; I think I visited Venice twice during that time, once with my family and once on a school field trip. I returned to Venice while I was attending college, visited it again in 2000, and then lived there for several months in 2006. Why does the city keep drawing me back? Why have I incorporated it into my fiction and my roleplaying? What does that method of incorporation suggest about how Venice operates as a personal symbol in my psyche?

I’m still working through the question. But I hope our students will find Venice as memorable as I did as a teenager, when I first stepped out of the train station and saw its timeless canals and churches spread before me like the promise of a future I never could have imagined.

Here is the abstract for “The Renaissance of the Pilgrimage”

Imagining Venice
A pilgrimage to Venice, “La Serenissima,” was obligatory for those making the Grand Tour since the seventeenth century, especially for artists. From Turner to Stieglitz, artists set up their easels or cameras at specific sites in the city to transform these views into resplendent visions. My dream to recreate such a visit took flight with a chance encounter with a professor of Communication, and the collaboration has resulted in a course for students at the university to learn about and reflect on the history, art, architecture and performing arts of the city, the techniques of watercolor, and on Venice as a symbol that permeates Western culture (even Venice, California, and Las Vegas!). A post-semester trip in May, 2011 will include a stay in a palazzo to allow students to walk in the footsteps of the masters to create a personal record of their pilgrimage. This presentation will review the process by which this course has evolved and the outcomes expected when students encounter the masterpieces of some of the artists of the past who were influenced by Venice, and when they endeavor to put their own experience with the city to paper and to contemporary visual media.

Terry Spehar-Fahey, San Giorgio Maggiore, WC, 2010

It’s easy to plan a trip by thinking,  “well, students won’t want to spend all two weeks in Venice, so we’d better throw in some side excursions and take them down to Florence to make sure we attract enough to ‘make’ the class.”  And that kind of pragmatic planning can’t be ignored. But I dipped into the academic literature on travel courses today and quickly found “Travel as Performed Art” by Judith Adler, which offers another way in which to consider travel planning:

Travel undertaken and executed with a primary concern for the meanings discovered, created, and communicated as persons move through geographical space in stylistically specified ways can be distinguished from travel in which geographical movement is merely incidental to the accomplishment of other goals. Whether skillfully fulfilling the conventions of a canonized tradition without any deviation, deliberately challenging received norms, or being led through the motions of a “packaged” performance designed and sold by  others, the traveler whose activity lends itself to conceptual treatment as art is one whose movement serves as a medium for bestowing meaning on the self and the social, natural, or metaphysical realities through which it moves. Performed as an art, travel becomes one means of “worldmaking” [...] and of self-fashioning. (p. 1368, emphasis added)

In an ideal world where cost was no object, Terry and I would have loved to create a “Grand Tour” class, which would be the “conventions of a canonized tradition” version mentioned above. As it is, we’re offering something more pop-culture, the “‘packaged’ performance,” although I hope that by involving students directly in artistic process and requiring an active, ongoing level of meaning-making, we can turn the process itself into art.

This is something to keep thinking about as we plan….

Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94, No. 6 (May, 1989), pp. 1366-1391 Published by: The University of Chicago Press. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2780963