Skip to main content

2024 Italian Study Tour

The eighth grade's annual Italian Study Tour - 10 days exploring Assisi, Florence, and Rome - is a longstanding capstone experience for our graduating class and their teachers.

The trip, which takes place each year during the two weeks prior to spring break, provides the opportunity for our boys to visit in-situ the actual paintings, sculpture, and architectural sites they have studied all year in their art history class. At each site, they deepen their understanding through reflective journaling and sketching what they see.

This year, our flight landed in Rome on Tuesday morning, March 5. The day was a beauty. We headed straight to the medieval city of Assisi, for a visit to the Basilica of Saint Francis. The setting of this beautiful village against the Umbrian hillside is breathtaking, humbling, and inspiring. We concluded our Assisi visit with lunch at Enoteca San Pietro, the first of several delicious meals we would share over the next ten days.

The Study Tour continued with four days each in Florence and Rome. In preparation for the trip, the boys, in groups of four or five, were assigned an iconic Renaissance building in Florence to research. They learned about the building, its patron, architect, and significance; and they shared the results of their inquiries with each other. They also wrote an essay about their team's effort and created a visual representation of the building in the medium of their choice, using skills learned and practiced in observational drawing classes. When they reached their site in Italy, they presented their research findings to their fellow classmates and faculty. 


In Florence, we visited Il Duomo and enjoyed the always exhilarating view from the top of its bell tower, closely observed Michelangelo's David in the Accademia (the first of four David statues we would visit), and took in masterpieces at the Uffizi Gallery, Bargello, and Santa Croce, among others.

While our time in Rome began with a "cats and dogs" rainy-day visit to the Colosseum and Roman Forum, the weather gods soon showed mercy, delivering blue skies for our subsequent excursion to the Galleries at Villa Borghese. A highlight of our Rome experience was access to Vatican City, where we were able to walk by the gardens and entered St. Peter's Basilica through a special door.

Throughout the trip, the boys made our community proud as their mature presence, scholarly inquisitiveness, and astute observations impressed their teachers, guides, and passers-by alike. By the tour's end, we had covered hundreds of miles, seen countless masterpieces dating back centuries - with lessons still relevant today - celebrated two boys' birthdays, and bonded closer with each other.

In addition to providing our eighth-grade boys the opportunity to hone their skills in analytical and creative thinking, writing, observation, and reflection, the Italian Study Tour connects the graduating class in a shared multi-faceted signature experience that they will always remember. 

Popular posts from this blog

"The Wisdom Within" - Building Student Motivation Through Choice

In the third entry of our Teaching Boys Initiative quarterly blog series, Master Teacher Jim Barbieri explores how providing boys with agency to choose builds motivation and enhances learning. BUILDING STUDENT MOTIVATION THROUGH CHOICE By the time I was eight years old, I had become completely absorbed in all things baseball. Living in New York was perfect for a baseball fan; although I was a Mets fan thanks to my idol, Tom Seaver, I was also interested in learning about all the amazing Yankees stars of yore. How could I call myself a baseball fan if I didn’t know the history and records of stars like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Yogi Berra? I loved collecting baseball cards and reading the career statistics of each player on the back. Looking through my collection one day, I discovered that I shared a birthday with the legendary Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente. At eight years old, I was crushed to hear the news that he had died tragically in a plane crash while trying to ...
Read more

"The Wisdom Within" - The Superpower of Performance

In the following entry of our Teaching Boys Initiative blog series, Saint David's Director of Music and Master Teacher Jeffrey Moore explores how participating in performances and productions build transformative competencies, transmit values, and inspire boys to excel. Jose Antonio Abreu, one of the leading educators in classical music and the founder of El Sistema said this: “Music has to be recognized as an agent of social development in the highest sense, because it transmits the highest values  — solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it can unite an entire community and express sublime feelings.”¹ At Saint David’s School, performance begins in the very first years. Each class, from Pre-K through Eighth Grade, presents their work to an audience of peers and parents, whether it is a story, a skit, a play, a lecture, or a musical presentation. But the increasing complexity and demands on our boys to push themselves to another level is the key to their development and succes...
Read more

"The Wisdom Within" - Writing and Thinking

In our continuing efforts through the Teaching Boys Initiative at Saint David's School ™ , one of our visiting scholars, Dr. Ric Campbell, engages in ongoing reflective practice with our faculty. Below, Dr. Campbell shares an example of a freewriting initiative that was born from the collaboration between literature teacher Jamie MacNeille and history teacher Drew Burton, who sought to address forms of student engagement in their respective disciplines.  WRITING and THINKING:  A Learning Community Engaged in the Knowledge-Making Practices of the Disciplines “Whoa, this freewriting is really helpful !” The above quote by a sixth-grade literature student captures a revelatory moment; he has discovered the wealth of ideas at the end of his pen as he writes to describe what he is noticing in the novel the class is reading and discovers that what he notices leads to questions, and that those questions, in turn, lead to bigger ideas. “All there is to thinking is seeing something not...
Read more