www.nydailynews.com/09-04-2005/entertainment/col/story/343007p-292761c.html
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Peter Weller Tomorrow night at 9, actor Peter Weller will appear at the Colosseum and other monuments of ancient Rome in the History Channel documentary "Rome : Engineering an Empire." The former RoboCop is one of the experts shari ng his knowledge in this superb two-hour companion piece to the current HBO miniseries "Rome." Weller, 58, who holds a master's degree in Roman and Renaissance art and is working toward a PhD, has become one of Syracuse University's most popular professors. "My fascination with ancient Rome started as a kid back in Texas when my father turned me on to Robert Graves, who wrote 'I, Claudius,'" says Wel ler, speaking from the South African set of the adventure movie "Prey." "I was always reading about the great emperors of Rome and then I starte d collecting first-century coins." Part of Weller's obligation for his MA was to take eight students a yea r to Italy. "When you do that, you have to study Rome again because the Renaissance i s such a rebirth of antiquity," he says. "So during 2001, 2003, 2004 I w as doing these field trips to Rome, and then the dean of the Fine Arts D epartment asked me to teach my own class at Syracuse, ad hoc." Last year, Weller taught a course called "Hollywood and the Roman Empire. " "It's a classics course posing as a film course," he says. "Eighty kids s igned up thinking they'd get an easy A from RoboCop. When they saw the r eader was 450 pages, including Homer and Suetonius, a quarter of the cla ss dropped out. Those that stayed had a blast reading a portion of the r eader, taking a quiz to be sure they'd read it. There were 20-year-old kids who thought Marlon Brando was jus t some fat old actor until they saw him walk on screen as Marc Antony. T hen their world cracked open and they rushed to see all his movies." Halfway through the course, the dean told Weller to take the 15 best stud ents to Italy to show them the places where the history occurred. Weller, who lives in Manhattan and has a second home in Italy, can often be found holding forth about ancient Rome in restaurants like Northwest. On one occasion, an art director friend named Kevin Boyle told Weller t hat Vinny Kralyevich, who runs KTI Productions, was making a History Cha nnel documentary about ancient Rome. "He told me to put on a suit and go downtown to the old Bowery Bank - bec ause it has neo-Roman architecture - where they'd like to interview me o n tape about Rome," Weller says. Last year, the film's producers brought Weller from his Positano home to do a walk-and-talk in the footprints of the ancients in Rome. In the documentary, he and other experts and historians tell entertaining stories about the Romans' feats of engineering: building a 1,000-foot b ridge over the Rhine to invade Germania, constructing aqueducts that del ivered 200 million gallons of water per day into Rome, inventing waterpr oof concrete used to build a sewer system that's still in use today, and building the Colosseum (capacity: 70,000) in seven years. "Julius Caesar built that bridge over the Rhine in 10 days," Weller says. They've been trying to fix the Van Wyck since I moved to New York City in 1971. Twenty years and $20 billion later and we still don' t have a subway to JFK." We Love Lists Rome sweet Rome The best of the Eternal City on screen: 1 "La Dolce Vita" (1960) 2 "Open City" (1945) 3 "The Bicycle Thief" (1948) 4 "Roman Holiday" (1953) 5 "I, Claudius" (1976, TV) 6 "Fellini's Roma" (1972) 7 "Ben-Hur" (1959) 8 "Gladiator" (2000) 9 "Titus" (1999) 10.
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