Latin

I find that an engaging way to learn about various subjects, such as art history, design, literature, history and culinary arts, is to include language study with those subjects. This gives students and teachers of languages some interesting material to work with and also enhances the study of those other subjects. The pages under this menu tab give a few examples of this, with Latin.

I was fortunate that our high school French teacher also taught Latin so we learned enough about Latin from him to help us understand English grammar and vocabulary as well as our French lessons. He is now a professor at the University of San Diego. Then, as a History major at UCLA, I took upper division classes in Roman history from Prof. Ronald Mellor, where I studied Catullus, Tacitus, Vitruvius and many others in translation and with side-by-side reference to the original Latin texts.

When I lived in Italy (for seven years, after college) I traveled extensively there, visiting ancient Roman sites and museums in Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Milan and Brescia as well as Etruscan sites in Volterra, Tuscany, the Greek theater at Taormina, Sicily and the temple at Paestum.

I enjoy reading bilingual editions of Latin works, either Latin-to-English or Latin-to-Italian. So I have always enjoyed Latin although I never studied it formally. In these web pages, the translations of the Roman recipes and of Catullus are mine, as they are not difficult or complicated. However the translations of Tacitus and Vitruvius are by others and credited on those pages.

Latin

ATTENDE TIBI means “Attend to yourself” or “Mind your own business” in Latin. My aunt who has been a nun for more than 60 years tells me that this was posted on the wall in the refectory of her first convent.