Every semester, students and faculty from the School of Architecture experience firsthand why Rome wasn’t built in a day.

“Anywhere you carve into the earth here, you’re going to find something,” says Carmen Guerrero, B.Arch. ’90, research assistant professor and coordinator of the school’s Undergraduate Rome Program, launched in 1991 by Professor Jose Gelabert-Navia.

Each year some 30 undergraduates and about a dozen graduate students spend a semester in Rome taking courses with UM professors and local professionals.

“Every day was memorable—walking around, taking a different route to get to the same place, discovering something new,” says Carly Weisman, a fifth-year student who participated during the spring 2007 semester. “Rome is full of surprises.”

Like all students in the program, Weisman completed a final project that addresses the challenges of creating new architecture in such an ancient and multilayered city. She helped design a museum for the Forma Urbis, a 60-by-45-foot marble map of ancient Rome that dates back to around 200 A.D. Much of the map is missing, but Weisman’s team envisioned a space that would display the known fragments and educate visitors about its historical significance.

“The city itself is a museum of architectural, political, and social history,” says Guerrero, whose first trip to Italy was as a UM undergrad in a summer program led by Professor Tomas Lopez-Gottardi. “On the same street you can find examples of ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern art and architecture.”

The Rome program focuses on three time periods—the ancient, the Christian, and the modern. This fall the School of Architecture hosted an exhibit called The Three Romes in the Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center, showcasing the work of students in the program.