Picture of me with the Leaning Tower of Pisa on a personal travel trip with peers
Author: Ellie Corbitt | Majors: Landscape Architecture, Psychology | Semester: Summer 2023
After a 10 hour flight from the Atlanta International Airport to the Rome Airport Fiumicino, I got in line to get my passport checked and stamped. Even standing in the twisting and turning curves of Italian customs, it still didn’t feel real. It wasn’t until I was standing at my apartment door trying to figure out Italian door knobs that I really felt like I had started my study abroad journey. I was staying in the center of Rome for 10 weeks to study landscape architecture so I could be able to better design within an urban environment and understand the challenges that that holds.
View of St. Peter’s from Bridge St. Angelo
Within those hot summer months, my studio class traveled to many different parts of Italy and saw Tuscany, Florence, Sienna, San Gimignano, Pienza, Orvieto, and many others. We got to see and experience a type of living that I’ve never really seen before apart from movies and social media. It was both incredible and deeply rewarding. A big part of design is getting to know the who, what, and why of your design context. This helps your project and ideas solve problems and make a lasting impact that a community can enjoy and cherish for many years. By studying in Rome, I learned so much about the culture and the values of the Italian people. It not only made my final design project applicable but a space that the community would accept and occupy.
Sketching atop one of Rome’s seven hills
In fact, one of my favorite experiences apart from the many wondrous and beautiful views was getting to become a local at a community bakery. On the last day of study abroad I got to present and show my final work to the employees that I had become friends with. When I was first coming to the bakery, they scoffed and laughed as I would come in every day and order a cappuccino and croissants, but after a week or so we began to joke and laugh. They didn’t speak a lot of english (and I not a lot of italian) but somehow we managed to get by with hand gestures and context clues. I told them that our project was the piazza right outside their bakery and they were very excited to see what I would do with it (since it was in dire need of a redesign). The disappointment that my design was not actually real and just a school project told me how much they wanted that space to be better, and how much designers could actually impact the world around us.
One of my favorite classes I got to take that summer was our landscape architecture theory class. We read a book that was a collection of different writings and views about what landscape architecture is, how we should design, and what our main focus should be. This was a discussion based course and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the different opinions but also listening to my classmates’ thoughts and views too. Design is such a big world and I love how diverse it can be in thought and creation.
One of my biggest pieces of advice for anyone studying abroad is to travel outside of the school sponsored trips and to get to know the people around you (both classmates and locals). Traveling was so fun and a great way to get to see other parts of the world. Getting to know the bakery employees was something that I will never forget. By traveling I got to see Pisa, Lake Como, Naples, and the Amalfi coast with my friends and peers. By meeting new people I got to sink deeper into a foreign culture and enjoy friendships that made my study abroad experience better. Those memories are some of my most cherished from my time across the pond.
