Italy Study Abroad with the Honors College

My study abroad in Italy will be an experience that I will never forget! As a STEM student, a course about art, literature, and history in a foreign country where I do not speak the language was way out of my comfort zone and that was exactly why I had to do it. This trip helped me realize how vastly different other cultures are and how much we can learn from them. Since I grew up in Miami I've always been exposed to many different cultures and yet visiting Europe and seeing the customs of the Italians was a complete cultural shock that I absolutely loved. Whether a few miles away or 10 hours by plane, there is a lot to learn from every place I've visited and from each person I've had the pleasure of meeting. This Honors class first consisted of a semester at FIU studying Italian literature, architecture, and history, and then a month-long trip to see everything we had learned and more in person. Our classroom consisted of museums filled with masterpieces, beautiful churches, historic sites, and hikes all around Italy. For the time we were there we lived like the Italians, we walked and took the metro everywhere, ate like them, and learned from them. It was a complete cultural immersion.
There was a tradition in the 17th and 18th century in which upper-class young men would travel around Europe and learn about art, literature, and be exposed to other cultures as their coming of age (about 21 years old) and they called it the Grand Tour. Our class was called Grand Tour Redux because it was several students from different ages, genders, and cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds coming together to explore the same places around Italy that the Grand Tour students studied before but with a modern lens. 
Enjoy some pictures from my Italy trip that I have put above and please click on the button below to be taken to the website of my Grand Tour Redux Project. The second button will take you to a website where I wrote about each place we visited called Italia as Text.