Roman Engineering
Wow I cannot believe that that it is already Tuesday and that we have been here for a week! I bet you can guess, yes it did rain again today. So far it has rained everyday except one. We were indoors for most of the day so I guess that is good that we did not miss nice weather.
We went to a church called San Pietro in Vincoli, or St. Peter in Chains. According to tradition, the two chains that were used to shackle St. Peter when he was in the Mamertine Prison were separated at one time and miraculously re-linked somehow. The chains were in this church shown in the picture below. The tomb of Julius II, the Pope who had St. Peter’s church in the Vatican built is in this church. Another amazing piece of artwork is in here of Michelangelo’s Moses.
Our last stop of the day was next door to San Pietro in Vincoli, which was the Universita degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” the Roman School of Engineering. We listened to the professors speak about many different topics of Ancient Rome and today including: ancient roman engineering, the Roman roads, Roman Bridges, and materials they used on ancient Rome. It was amazing to see an FEA (Finite Element Analysis) of the Colosseum! They took a lot of time to do it and used 13522 elements and 27588 nodes, I wish I asked them how long the analysis took to finish. It was really neat to see how the engineering aspects apply to all of the sights that we have been seeing the past week. I would go into more detail, but I think I might have lost some of you back at the FEA part.
We also got to talk to some of the Civil Engineering students about what it is like to be an Italian Engineering student, they were pretty funny. Their classrooms were beautiful, the ceilings were painted, shown below and their floors were like mosaics. We gave all of the professors certificates of appreciation and dream catchers with Italian explanations as a gift.
Phrase of the day: I'm sorry! Sono spiacente! Pronounced: sohnoh spee-ahchehnteh