Overview

Every January during Biola University’s Interterm, a group of Torrey Honors Institute students travel to Rome, Italy. Torrey Rome is a two-week study trip worth four credits in the Torrey Honors Institute program. Like Torrey’s other off-campus programs, credits earned in this program may be applied to junior or senior year Torrey requirements. Students may also use Torrey Rome units as a substitute for the Torrey Thesis. To participate, a student must be enrolled in the Torrey Honors Institute program.

The Torrey Rome program is composed of twenty students, from sophomores to seniors. Students travel and live together in Rome where they have several sessions on assigned reading, viewing Rome’s great art and architecture and, if desired, making day trips to important cities near Rome including Assisi and Subiaco. Though the theme of the reading requirements differ each year, the richness of Rome’s history, both Christian and pagan, is always a focus of the trip. Participants will visit the famed Borghese Museum (home to five Caravaggio paintings and several famous Bernini statues), the four major Roman basilicas, the Catacombs of St. Callistus, the Colosseum, the Ufficio Scavi beneath St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museums, including the Sistine Chapel. As well, many churches are visited which contain other great works of art including statues by Michelangelo and Bernini, paintings by Caravaggio and Raphael and early Christian mosaics. Students will have the opportunity to climb to the top of the dome of St. Peter’s, shop in the world-renown Via del Corso shopping district and visit such well-known sites as the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain and the Bocca della Verita, made famous in the movie Roman Holiday. Finally, students will attend an English-speaking, Protestant church in order to worship with Roman believers in the Eternal City and the historical heart of western Christianity.

You will be supervised and led by full-time Torrey tutor Dr. Greg Peters, assisted by his wife Christina.