Teaching the Art of Giving

Photograph by Patricia Buss

Florence’s Renaissance art and cultural vitality have long made the city a top destination for American college students in search of an overseas experience. But between visits to the David or the Duomo, few of those students have an opportunity to volunteer to help people in Florence, says Jim Miller, senior executive of Studio Art Centers International, in New York.

His nonprofit organization has operated a study-abroad program in Florence since 1975 that emphasizes volunteerism and service along with the intellectual and professional development of its students.

“A lot of American programs act like golden ghettos. They take a lot from the community, they take a lot from the society, and they give very little back,” Mr. Miller says.

The organization enrolls 600 students a year, most of them from the United States, who take architecture, art-conservation, digital-art, drawing, art-history, and other arts-related courses.

In addition to their coursework, many students participate in service projects, such as painting a mural at a local hospital for children with HIV or holding art-therapy classes for young people with Down syndrome.

Students also use their professional skills to repair historic artifacts and buildings of Florence. This spring, students in the conservation program began work to restore objects from the seventh century B.C. that have sat unexamined in the Archaelogical Museum of Florence since the tombs where they were found were excavated more than a century ago. Skeletons and funerary objects from the tombs, pictured here, are expected to be put on display at the museum after the restoration is complete.

And for the past nine years, conservation students and faculty members have worked to repair frescoes and furnishings of the Conservatorio di Santa Maria Degli Angioli, a chapel damaged in a 1966 flood.

Because it has no development staff, Studio Art Centers International relies on its trustees, faculty members, and alumni to raise money for special projects, like the chapel restoration. Tuition pays for most of its $5-million operating budget.