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The Eternal City– Rome is the capital and the largest city of Italy. Situated in the west-central part of the country on the Tiber River, the “City of the Seven Hills” was founded by Romulus in 753 B.C.

The City of Love– Rome is the see of the pope as the holy kingdom Vatican City is within the city of Rome. Rome is also the capital of Latium and of Rome province as well.

Often dubbed as the “Capital of the World,” the city of Rome is one of the world’s richest cities in history and art and one of its great cultural, religious, and intellectual centers.

Home to numerous beautiful sites, museums and art galleries, Rome is one of the most coveted tourist destinations of the world. Rome attracts bulks of tourists from all over the globe. Museums and galleries are the major attraction of the city. Roman museums and galleries are sumptuous storehouses of art and culture. They give great glimpses of rich roman history, culture, and religion. Some of the popular museums and galleries of Rome are discussed below.

Museum Galleria Borghese: The museum offers the great collection assembled by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The museum features major works by Raphael, Rubens, Titian, Caravaggio, Bernini, Antonello da Messina and Canova.

Galleria Colonna: The magnificent Galleria Colonna is base in huge complex of imperial Palazzo Colonna. The gallery displays a number of masterpieces by artists including Lorenzo Monaco, Bronzino, Ghirlandaio, Salviati, Veronese, Palma il Vecchio, Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto, Pietro da Cortona, Annibale Carracci, Francesco Albani, Guercino, Guido Reni, Carlo Maratta, Gaspard Dughet, Crescenzio Onofri, Girolamo Muziano, and Pompeo Batoni.

Barberini Palace and National Gallery of Antique Art (The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica): The Palazzo Corsini and the Palazzo Barberini are the two sites of the gallery. The Palazzo Barberini is one of the grandest palaces in Rome. The Gallery sites with elegant interiors feature works by Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Lorenzo Lotto, Andrea del Sarto, Perugino, Pietro da Cortona, Caravaggio, Canaletto and Raphael.

Doria Pamphili Gallery: The Gallery houses one of Rome’s most distinguished private art collections, including works by Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael, Vel

First off, let me just remind you that our bodies are never static. This means that sometimes our energy and strength are going to be higher than at other times. When we are feeling low, we should realize that its time to back off, and enter a different phase of training. This is what the old school bodybuilders meant when they preached the saying, “listening to your body.” Your body talks to you in subtle ways. If you learn to listen to your body, you will keep progressing smoothly. Periodization is one way to train that allows you to continue making progress. Periodization is defined as a process of structuring your training into phases.

Begin by dividing a six-month period of time into three 8-week phases. The first 8 weeks is the strength phase. During this time you will train with heavier weights. The second eight-week phase will have you training with weights that will promote muscle growth. The last eight-weeks will act to preserve what muscle you have gained and to rid the body of excess body fat. Your sample six-month plan would look like this:

Phase I: Weeks 1-8, 4-7 Reps
Phase II: Weeks 9-16, 8-11 Reps
Phase III: Weeks 17-24, 12-15 Reps

In phase I, you will split the body into four groups and train each group once per week. This will ensure that you recuperate fully from each workout and maximize your strength gains.

Monday-chest and shoulders
Tuesday-off
Wednesday-back and hamstrings, abs
Thursday-off
Friday-arms
Saturday-off
Sunday-Quads, calves

You may notice that I have divided leg training into two days. The reason is simple–when I train quads hard, I just do not have enough energy left to hit another large body part like hams. In general, perform three sets of three exercises for each body part. The first set will be a warm-up or acclimation set, followed by three working sets. Since this workout plan includes plenty of rest, you should be able to train to failure on each of your work sets and still avoid over-training. Avoid forced repetitions and negatives, however.

Try to improve your performance each week by either doing one more rep with the same weight or by doing the same number of reps but with more weight. Rest up to three minutes between the more complex lifts like squats and two minutes between the less taxing exercises like curls.

Phase II
During weeks 9-16, you will divide the body into four different groups and train using a two days on, one day off schedule. This will have you training each body part a little more frequently to maximize hypertrophy.

Monday: Chest, Shoulders, and Abs
Tuesday: Back and Hams
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: Biceps, Triceps, and Abs
Friday: Quads and Calves
Saturday: Off
Sunday: repeat cycle

The rest period during Phase II should be 90 – 120 seconds between sets.

Phase III
Now it is time to fine-tune that physique by dropping some fat. For starters, you will divide your body into three parts and train using a three on, one off schedule. As you will notice, we are going to train legs in one session. Your workout cycle will look like this:

Monday: Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps
Tuesday: Back and Biceps
Wednesday: Legs (Quads, Hams, and Calves)
Thursday: Off
Friday: repeat cycle

The rest period between exercises for this phase should be limited to between 45 and 90 seconds.

In order to make this program work, your nutrition program must also be a priority. To make this simple, you will periodize the nutrition plan to correspond to the training program. To do so, you basically begin your first phase with a fairly high amount of calories–all from clean food. Then gradually decrease your calories and increase your cardio as you move from phase I-III.

If you are compliant with this program, you will make gains. At the end of phase III, take a week or two off from training. You will have earned it, and it will do your body good!

Until next time, train hard and smart!

By: Dr. Malea Jensen

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Zhang Dali’s intention throughout his body of work is to call attention to the changes taking place in Chinese society primarily due to the destruction of long standing communities. He wants to enter into a dialogue with his compatriots whom he sees as becoming increasingly estranged as the drive towards modernisation continues. His early graffiti work can still be seen all over the Chinese capital. His signature outline of a human head was found, among other places, on traditional courtyard houses marked for demolition.

The artist called this graffiti work “Dialogue” and documented it by photography.According to the artist, immigrant workers who have traveled from the rural areas all over China to earn a living in construction sites in Chinese cities, are the most important members of the Chinese race, who are shaping our physical reality. Yet, they are the faceless crowd who live at the bottom of our society. To cast them in resin is a way to recognize their existence and contribution as well as to capture a fast-changing point of time in the Chinese society.

From 2003 to 2005, Zhang has portrayed 100 immigrant workers in life-size resin sculptures of various postures, with a designated number, the artist’s signature and the work’s title “Chinese Offspring” tattooed onto each of their bodies. They are often hung upside down, indicating the uncertainty of their life and their powerlessness in changing their own fates.
Zhang Dali went on to make portraits of migrant workers’ faces and resin casts of their heads or entire bodies. Having a studio on the outskirts of Beijing, Zhang Dali became acquainted with a community of migrant workers who lives nearby.

Migrant workers have emerged as a product of the urbanization and growth of the main Chinese cities. Mobility has come with reform and this is not always an easy choice. The cities have developed into places of wealth and opportunity, thus drawing all sorts of people in search of better lives. However with this growth of the cities and the introduction of so much from the West: architecture, food, fashion, social manners, etc. has come also great uncertainty. For the migrant worker uncertainty is one of the key elements of their existence. Zhang Dali wanted to bring these people and their hard, bitter lives to the attention of others, and did so by creating head and body casts of volunteers from among these people as well as painting their portraits in his AK-47 series.The presentation of the body casts is vital to transmitting the artist’s message. They are shown hanging upside down from ropes tied around their ankles.

The imagery is shocking: hanging like carcasses of meat, in mid-air, in limbo. The artist uses the Chinese “dao xuan” to express being upside down in limbo without any inner strength to turn their bodies. These works capture the spirit, or lack thereof, of these workers. For Zhang Dali, his sculptures are living taxonomy, a human version of insect samples (“biao ben”) except the specimens are live people. It is a documentation of the species at a specific moment in history.

By: Amit Bittu

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Think back to when you were a child for a moment – how did you feel when the postal worker delivered a letter addressed just to you? Most kids feel excitement, enjoyment and enthusiasm when they get a letter. It doesn’t matter what the letter contained – the important thing was that it was addressed to them.

Now fast forward to today – how do you feel when you sort through your mail? Days when you get nothing but bills – I am betting you don’t feel so great. But what happens when you get a cheque, an unexpected prize or a lovely long newsy letter? Do you stop and read the letter and get a feeling of warmth and happiness?

Now – think about emails. In today’s society, email has replaced a lot of how we communicate. We email each other with our news and happenings. But how do you feel when you open your email? Do you get the same excitement and enthusiasm?

What does all of this have to do with business and life?

For managers, a hand written note of thanks to a great employee on a job well done means a whole lot more than an emailed note.

In life, think about writing your news down, rather than emailing it. A written letter builds strong relations and feelings – think of the old-fashioned love letters. Email letters don’t really have the same appeal.

Most businesses today rely on email as their main form of communicating with their customers. It doesn’t matter how great and how newsy your email is – it just doesn’t give your customers the same warm feeling as a letter, personally addressed to them, in their mailbox.

A few years ago, all the marketing stats leant towards email as the most potent form of marketing. Now they are tending to head the other way. Email marketing is still strong, but we are seeing a resurgence of direct mail as a way of communicating (and selling).

The challenge is many of us have lost the skill of writing a great letter. A letter that is full of news, interest and excitement that moves towards a logical conclusion. We have been trained to write for email – short, sharp bites of information that fit onto the screen that can be scanned in one view.

The good news is that if you are interested in building your business and getting ahead of the trend there are a few ways you can do this.

Postcards are a great way to grab attention. Make them colourful, make them interesting and personally address them. Ideally put a proper stamp on them rather than a franked or postage paid approach. Each time you add in a touch that makes it feel like it was personally addressed to the customer, you add in a percentage point for the card to be read.

Postcards don’t take many words to write, so even if you are not a copywriter you will still have an effect. Keep it short, interesting and make sure you include a call to action -something along the lines of call now, visit my website or email me for more information.

The other good part is that postcards don’t have to be expensive to buy or have made up. On-line printing companies have great templates already loaded (or you can load your own). All you have to do is put in your text and from $42 for 100 you can send out postcards to your clients.

But what if what you want to say won’t fit on a postcard? Direct mail is still one of the most powerful advertising mediums today. Just join the Readers Digest direct mail list and you will see what I mean. Great copy, lots of interactive parts – all designed to get you to sign up for a subscription or buy a book.

Direct mail has its own rules (you can do entire courses on how to write direct mail pieces). Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your direct mail (all based on the lost art of letter writing).

* Keep it personal – include the persons name throughout the copy. If you don’t know the persons first name either try and find out or go for a title that identifies them. For example – Dear Fellow Guitar Enthusiast. Your best letters were addressed to you remember!

* Use lots of “you”s in the copy – Direct mail is not the time to go all formal with your writing – keep it chatty and direct, just like the letters you used to get from your friends.

* Lose the jargon – you may know what your jargon means, but err on the side of caution and cut the jargon out of your copy.

* Tell a story – stories are some of the most powerful psychological triggers known. Think back to fairy stories when you were a child. What stories can you include about your service or product?

* Prove it – you need to include proof about your goods and services, so include testimonials, awards or other information to prove your claims. If you just say you are great – this is not as powerful as Mrs Mary Jones of Blackwood St, Mitchelton saying you are great.

* Don’t waffle (enough said on this point).

* Call to action – make sure there is a point to your letter and get to it. Make sure it is crystal clear what you want the person to do as a result of your letter. Don’t assume that people will know what to do after reading your letter – spell it out.

If you are not confident in your letter writing ability, then have a copywriter look over your letter and refine it for you before it goes out.

The bottom line is to put pen to paper and write letters, in whatever way you can. You will be surprised at the results you will achieve.

By: Ingrid Cliff

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