Facilities

Siena School

Through an affiliation with the Siena School for Liberal Arts, housed in the oldest part of the city, students enrolled in the Wooster Summer in Tuscany program will have access to classrooms, a small English language library, and wireless computer facilities.

Lectures on Location

In a larger sense, the cities of Siena, Rome, Florence, and the other medieval Tuscan centers of power will be our regular classrooms, with lectures on location nearly every day. Trips to museums, galleries, churches, and the public spaces around which medieval life was centered will provide a laboratory setting for our historical investigations.

Housing and Field Trips

In order to facilitate immersion into Tuscan life, students will share apartments in the center of Siena. Through the experience of independent apartment living, students will be encouraged to engage in the daily patterns of life by shopping at local markets, cooking the Italian way, and observing the social ritual of gathering in il Campo, the site of Siena’s famous annual horserace, the Palio. To encourage the experience of learning a city on foot, all accommodations, including for our field trip to Florence, will be centrally located.  Field trips and transfers to and from the airport in Rome will be provided by licensed private transport. Optional excursions on free days can be arranged through the director of the program. Siena’s optimal location puts Mediterranean beaches, inland lakes, designer clothing, and the famous Tuscan wine regions and agriturismo (farm holiday) centers within easy reach. Of course students will want to spend most of their time in libraries and museums, but quietly observing the pace of life in a small Tuscan hillside town can also be a valuable learning experience.