6. Peter Parker ♫

Interviewer: With us in the studio this morning is Peter Parker. Good morning, Peter.

Peter: Good morning.

Interviewer: Peter Parker is an English Language teacher. He was always good at languages at school, so he decided to take his degree in French and German. When he finished his university studies, he began teaching in a secondary school in England. Two years later, however, he met someone by chance who offered him a job teaching English to foreign students during the long summer holidays. His students were adults and he enjoyed the work immensely. He soon found he was more interested in teaching his own language to foreigners than foreign languages to English schoolboys. Since then he has specialised in this work. He has found that one of the advantages of the job is that it enables him to find work almost anywhere in the world. First he went to Africa for two years and then he spent a year in Arabia. After this he went to Greece where he has worked for the last 3 years. He hasn’t been to South America yet but he intends to go there next. He has taught men and women of all ages and of various nationalities. He has also learned to get on with all kinds of people and to adjust to different ways of life. So far he has not regretted his decision to follow this career. Now then, Peter, tell me...

7. Roman Architecture ♫

Diana E. E. Kleiner: Welcome to Roman Architecture. I’m Professor Kleiner, and what I’d like to do today is to give you a sense of some of the great buildings and some of the themes that we will be studying together this semester. I think it’s important to note, from the outset, that Roman architecture is primarily an architecture of cities. The Romans structured a man-made, worldwide empire out of architectural forms, and those architectural forms revolutionized the ancient world and exerted a lasting influence on the architecture and the architects of post-classical times. This semester we will be concerned primarily with urban communities – with urban communities – and we will, in the first half of this semester, we will focus on the city of Rome, and in the second – and also central Italy, including Pompeii. And I wanted to show you, at the outset, an aerial view of Rome--you see it over here, on the left-hand side of the screen – that situates us in the very core of the ancient city. You see the famous Colosseum, the very icon of Rome, at the upper right. You see the Roman Forum, as it looks today, and you see a part of the Capitoline Hill, transformed by Michelangelo into the famous Campidoglio, as well as the Via dei Fori Imperiali of Mussolini, built by Mussolini, and the Imperial Fora.

So the city of Rome again we’ll be concentrating on, at the beginning of this semester, as well as the city of Pompeii. An aerial view of Pompeii, as it looks today. You can see many of the buildings of the city, including the houses and the shops, and also the entertainment district. This is the theater and the music hall of ancient Pompeii. The amphitheater is over here. And you can see, of course, looming up in the background, Mount Vesuvius, the mountain that caused all that trouble in 79 A.D.

So that’s the first half of the semester. The second half of the semester we are going to be going out into the provinces, into the Roman provinces, and that is going to take us – and we’re going to look at the provinces both in the eastern and the western part of the Empire – and that will take us to Roman Greece. It will take us to Asia Minor; Asia Minor, which of course is modern Turkey. It will take us to North Africa. It will take us to the Middle East, in what’s now Jordan and Syria, and it will also take us to Europe, to western Europe, to cities in France and to cities in Spain.

And let me just show you an example of some of the buildings that we’ll look at as we travel to the provinces. This is the Library of Celsus, in Ephesus, on the western coast of Turkey. This – the theater, a spectacularly well-preserved theater at Sabratha, you see on the upper right-hand side; and down here a restored view of the masterful Palace of Diocletian. We have the late Roman emperors in a place called Split, which is in Croatia, along the fabulously gorgeous Dalmatian Coast today…