While most Iowa State students spent their spring semester balancing schedules and cramming for tests, about 50 students from the College of Design learned about the history and art in Rome by taking walks amid the city’s ancient monuments and renaissance cathedrals.

“It was a lifetime experience, amazing,” said Lisa Ulch, graduate student in art education. “I see pictures of art monuments or something that relates over there, and I miss it so much. It’s amazing how people back then thought.”

Studying abroad in Rome is a selling point for ISU’s architecture program, but design college faculty also encourage students majoring in art and design and landscape architecture to participate.

Part of the Rome program includes an exhibit for students to show the work they did overseas. The Rome Exhibit, which is titled “Bound,” officially kicked off Friday in the Design Center and runs for a week.

“It gives people a chance to see what we do over here — how Rome’s influence affects design and to indirectly expose them to the culture,” said Eric Beron, senior in architecture.

This is the program’s seventh year, and each year it becomes more efficient, said Matthew Fisher, Rome program coordinator for the College of Design.

In the past, art and design students traveled to Rome in the fall and the architecture students followed in the spring. Now the program enables architecture and art and design students to go together in the fall, spring or summer.

“This year we’re starting to integrate and change the dynamics of the program, encourage more interactions,” said Fisher, adjunct assistant professor of architecture.

About 60 students are accepted into the architecture program during their second year of studies, he said. Of those 60, about three-fourths go to Rome before they graduate.

The prerequisites to study in Rome are fourth-year student status and performance in other architecture programs, Fisher said.

“What is appealing about teaching in Rome is an environment in which you can teach an immediate relationship with the thing you’re teaching,” he said. “You have direct access to an incredible depth of architectural history.”

The curriculum in Rome includes studio, art history, drawing and independent study.

“You see a picture in a book and you look up and there it is,” said Kristin Fairley, senior in architecture. “It’s incredible.”

Class time in Rome is not a typical university experience, Fisher said. Rather than staying inside a classroom and learning solely from books and slides, students go on walking tours around the city.

“We had history once a week, we’d see a slide show, and then we’d go on these ‘high-speed death marches,'” said Pete Surber, senior in architecture. “You’d learn about it moments before you got to the site and they’d lecture to us on the site. It wasn’t just a lecture class; it was a class on the hoof.”

Beron said the students can visit sites where most tourists would not have access.

“We got a tour underneath the Vatican and got to see the vaults where past popes are buried,” he said. “We also got to hear the Pope speak on Palm Sunday.”

Students saw St. Peter’s Square and Cathedral, San Giovanni Cathedral, the Pantheon and the Roman Forum.

The class also visited Sicily and northern Italy for a week.

“It snowed for the first time in 31 years while we were in Sicily,” Beron said about his trip last spring. “It figures that some kids from Iowa would bring snow.”

The Italian lifestyle in Rome has proved to be a culture shock for many of the students and faculty, said Shirlee Singer, professor of art and design, who taught in Rome during the fall semesters of 1997 and 1998.

“The culture is more relaxed — they are interested in getting to know you,” Singer said. “There is human joy and people enjoying and loving each other.”

The students are clustered into about five locations around the city and live in apartments. They usually can walk to the studio or use the municipal transportation systems.

“I lived on top of a coffee shop, and I miss hearing the clicking of cups and the smell of fresh bread,” Ulch said.

The architecture students take a six-week course in Italian while they are there, while art and design students are required to study Italian before they leave.

“The Italians are proud people — they will not speak English until you attempt to speak their language,” Surber said. “You gotta work for it.”

The faculty encourages students to revisit the same places and let the shop owners know that they are not tourists but Americans living in Italy who are trying to fit into the culture.

“My friends and I ordered pizza at a place near the Pantheon from the guy we called the ‘Angry Pizza Guy,'” Beron said. “We thought he was so rude, but the food was so good we kept going back. By the end of the semester, his face would light up when he saw us, but return back to looking angry when tourists came in. When it came time to leave, I knew I was going to miss that guy.”