Accademia Italiana

Studying abroad with Academia Italiana was truly a perspective-altering experience. First (and most importantly), I felt very safe and supported during my time in Florence. The accommodations were not only in prime locations around the city, but clean, modern, and extremely secure. The academics were challenging and exciting, offering a myriad of subjects and hands-on learning opportunities. Lastly, my favorite part of the program was the built-in travel! I left my time in Italy with a working knowledge of not only Florence but the Tuscan region as a whole. Thank you, Academia Italiana, for a wonderful and unique study abroad experience!

I loved my semester at Accademia Italiana! Getting to know my teachers was my favorite part; and they made it easy to adjust to a different style of learning than I’m used to at my college in America. To study art history in a renaissance city, learn Italian and be able to use it at my favorite coffee shops, and getting to read incredible works of Italian literature were all such special experiences that will always be important to me.

The best thing about this program is that they understand that you are abroad to do more than study in your room everyday. Our program always gave us Fridays off so that we could spend the entire weekend traveling throughout Europe. They want you to keep on top of your class work but they understand that you also learn a lot from your experiences outside of the classroom.

Advisors do their best to take care of you. A girl on our trip injured her foot and the program took care of everything including the cab ride to the hospital.

The only negative from my experience was the housing. However, I just got kind of unlucky because most of my friends stayed in pretty nice apartments close to the center of the city. Mine just wasn't great.

This is the perfect program if you want to branch out and meet new people but still have smaller class sizes. You hear of other programs with hundreds of students, ours had about 25 and we were all pretty close by the end of the trip. You're almost garunteed to come away with good friends and connections across the States and in other parts of the world.

I had an amazing experience.

On a side note, always travel on weekend trips with a company called Bus2Alps. They are the best and really make sure you have an amazing time.

The summer classes, we're less than stellar. I had had previous classes for Illustration and had hoped t further my artistic mediums and skills but it's hard to do that when you are copying a figure form a book cause that's all the teacher had us do. Least not till the last day…and even that was a very painful and long day of being told what to draw. Other student were typically 10-30 minutes late, if they showed up at all. Traveling was the only fun part of being over there and that was a weekend activity. At least we had three day weekends….
The school gave us some travel options through FlorenceForFun but I went on trip to Venice and it was horribly disorganized and the older tour guide was a bit rude to Americans so later me and my friends set up a few weekends with BusToAlps and got a better deal, tour guides our age, and much better planning.
The apartment was not air-conditioned which took a long time to get used to. I started sleeping with a frozen water bottle at night cause it was the only way to peacefully sleep.
I won't say this was a bad trip, just i was influence by many negative factors coming into the country that led to my overall negative mood. I was without luggage for a week and we had no fans on the most hottest week of unusual weather they'd seen. And i admit i was terribly homesick and fed up by the end of that week and classes let me down in their content. I appreciated ally he culture and history Florence had to offer, it was just harder for me to appreciate it after my expectations of school let me down. It's definitely a different experience and something I think everyone should feel, be that on vacation or study abroad.
Just make sure you know what content is in the classes before you decide on anything. I'm sue they're more strict during the school year but it was far too lax and far to uncaring for me to enjoy school there.

The opportunity to study abroad is a huge and great opportunity to learn what other schools around the world are doing and to help you determine whether your current school is ahead or needs some improving. This opportunity has giving the change to test my Design skills and knowledge and to compare how prepare I am to face the professional world. I have been a positive experience so far. I'm really happy that the Accademia is an international school, so I get to interact with many student from all over the world not just Italians. Two things that have been a little disappointing is the fact that even thought the classes are supposed to be taught in English not all the professors know English or like to speak in English so it makes it a little difficult to understand everything. Also the schedule organization is not great, but everyone has been really helpful to make sure I don't miss anything.