Why Rome Is the Right Place to Study the Humanities Now
Rome and the Future of the HumanitiesThere is an assumption, especially in the digital era, that the humanities belong to the past. That literature, philosophy, art history, and cultural studies are indulgences best enjoyed once the serious business of “employable skills” has been taken care of. In many places, universities seem to agree. Programs shrink. Funding disappears. The language around the arts becomes defensive and apologetic, an anxious future-facing rhetoric.Rome does not seem especially concerned by any of this.
That is one reason why it is the right time to study the humanities now and perhaps more than ever. Not because Rome resists technology or clings to tradition, but because it trains exactly the kinds of thinking that the digital age keeps revealing it cannot automate.
The humanities are increasingly treated as a luxury in a world obsessed with coders, data scientists, and biomedical breakthroughs. In Rome, they belong to the spatial. History, art and writing are not an airy alternative to practical skills students must acquire to survive in the current job market. They are something you tangible you walk by on your way to class or the office. Ideas are embedded in buildings, streets, fragments of wall that interrupt the present without justification or ingratiation. In Rome, you do not study contradiction as a concept. We live inside it. Ancient and modern sit side by side without resolving their differences, and no one expects them to.
This matters because one of the quiet skills the humanities cultivate is the ability to think critically and sit with unresolved meaning. To read carefully. To interpret rather than extract something tangible to present as a measurable output. To understand context without rushing to conclusion.
These are not nostalgic skills. They are precisely the capacities that become more valuable as machines get better at producing language, images, and information on demand. Rome does not teach students to generate content faster. It teaches them to decide what deserves attention.
That difference becomes clear when you watch how students learn here. A discussion about power, representation, belief, or memory does not stay theoretical for long. It is constantly tested against the fabric of the city itself. Who decided this was worth preserving. What was erased to make room for it. Why one story survives while another is buried beneath a road or a metro line. Humanities education in Rome is not sealed off from reality. It is forced into conversation with it.
Across Europe and the United States, humanities departments are being merged, downsized, or slowly phased out. As universities redirect funding toward measurable, technical outcomes, humanities programs are increasingly asked to justify their very existence. Rome, by contrast, still treats them as part of the city’s intellectual infrastructure rather than a discretionary expense. The city does not need to be convinced that ideas matter. They are everywhere you look.
There is also the question of pace. Much of contemporary education is organised around acceleration. More output. Faster turnaround. Measurable outcomes. Rome works against that instinct almost by accident. Things take time here. Processes stall everywhere you look. Answers often resist finality. For students, this can be frustrating at first. Then it becomes instructive, in a way.
This is especially important in a digital environment that rewards instant response. The humanities, at their best, create a pause between stimulus and judgment. Rome reinforces that pause. It trains students to look twice, to hold competing interpretations, to resist the pressure to simplify. These habits are not ornamental. They are foundational to ethical reasoning, cultural literacy, and serious thinking of any kind.
As humanities programs struggle elsewhere, Rome remains saturated with them. Not as museum pieces, but as living practices. Art history is not marginal here. Literature and creative writing are not detached from place. Philosophy is not confined to footnotes. The city itself insists that ideas matter because they shape how people live together over time.
This does not mean that studying the humanities in Rome is a retreat from the modern world. Quite the opposite. Digital tools are present. Artificial intelligence is part of the conversation. But students trained in interpretation, context, and judgment tend to use those tools differently. More critically. Less deferentially. They understand that technology extends human capacity, but does not replace responsibility.
Rome is also unusually good at teaching another skill that rarely appears on course outlines, which is intellectual humility. When you spend your days surrounded by evidence of lives, systems, and ambitions that once felt permanent and are now partial, fragmented, or repurposed, it becomes difficult to believe that your own moment is definitive. That perspective is immensely corrective. It tempers certainty. It encourages a certain seriousness without too much grandiosity.
Of course, one of the glaring issues is that none of this guarantees employment. No city can do that. But Rome offers something rarer and arguably far more durable. It teaches students how to think, to be critical, in a world where information is abundant. It does so not through slogans about modern relevance, but through immersion in a place that has been negotiating those conditions for centuries.
At a time when education is increasingly asked to justify itself in purely economic terms, Rome reminds us that some forms of value are so special that we should hold them dear. They are cumulative rather than immediate. The humanities do not promise any kind of efficiency. They promise pause in a digital era defined by speed. Rome remains one of the few places where observing and learning how to think still feels like the point.
