Working in teams of two the research team handles parts of the Italian story beginning from the course text, Christopher Duggan’s book, “A Concise History of Italy”. This topic requires far more time to properly digest, but given the span of our needs and shortness of time to prepare, each team presents a different part of the story to the class and hopefully by the end all have had an overview of the span of Italian history and have some initial understanding of the totality of design aesthetics. We will build out our context from there. In retrospect, the students and travelers to Italy often have a limited understanding of Italy’s past: mostly Roman or Renaissance and not much in between. In the field, we will encounter Etruscan tombs and Risorgimento monuments, Baroque buildings, Fascist and Modernist interventions and contemporary post-industrial design. In this, our hope is to see how this context manifests itself as a legacy even in the most current work of design.