This course will follow the thread of sex (passion, desire, romantic love) and the city (laws, politics, urban space and customs, and the civilizing process) from ancient texts (Plato’s Symposium, Aristotle’s Politics, Terence’s Andria, Ovid’s Art of Love, and Augustine’s Confessions and City of God) to the noble Parisian prostitute of Verdi’s Traviata, an urban sex-worker with a Platonic idea of self-sacrificing love. This course looks at a predominant cultural paradigm still in full vigor today – the love story – against its particular European, especially Italian, history. Other texts include excerpts from Boccaccio’s Decameron, Dante’s New Life and Divine Comedy, Petrarch’s lyric poems, Castiglione’s Courtier and Machiavelli’s play, Mandragola.

Course Requirements:

Evaluation will be based on strong class participation, frequent short writing (blog), two papers and a take-home final exam.