Participants
Students age 14-17.

Aim

• To encourage students to actively contribute to the conservation of cultural heritage by raising public awareness of the issues facing a given monument;
• to give students a basic grounding in managing a public advocacy campaign.

Project description
In this project, students symbolically adopted the Colosseum. They learned about its history, its cultural significance, and the state of its conservation. They visited it regularly, and became invested in its protection. Over an entire school year they undertook various projects to contribute to its preservation, and to raise public awareness about its condition.

The students talked with experts about the specific conservation problems:

• pollution;
• constant vibration caused by traffic;
• vibration caused by the underground trains that runs directly beneath the Coliseum;
• vandalism.

Main achievements
Following their in-class learning activities and their tours with conservation experts, students:

• created posters to alert the public about the conservation problems afflicting the Coliseum;
• developed an exhibition of their work, managed the exhibition planning, and were on hand to talk to the general public for the exhibition’s duration;
• conducted a large-scale public questionnaire to find out how much people knew about the state of the Coliseum.

updated on: 8 August, 2006