Students live, breathe and dream Shakespeare: we spend 10 days visiting London and Stratford-upon-Avon (where Shakespeare lived & worked) attend 3 of his plays, but also have fun as tourists (London eye, museums, river cruises, sky garden etc) then relax for 4 days and tour the Lake District and Cambridge).
Workshops in photography, collage, architecture/sketching and creative writing, both poetry and prose pieces, all aim at helping students connect individually and constructively with Shakespeare's texts and his cities.
We will also be immersed in theater, touring the Globe and attending two of his plays there and seeing another play in Stratford. Students read and act out the plays in workshops before we attend.
Then we're off to relax and tour the Lake District. Our last day is in Cambridge, where we visit the colleges and libraries and go punting on the River Cam.
Our next two weeks are in Italy. Students put on a Shakespeare play, make props, costumes, scenery and learn basics of directing, get a sense of the rhythm of Italian life (piazzas and ice cream) and travel to see the great Italian Renaissance and Roman art which illuminate his work.
Our home-base is an old stone schoolhouse, in the hills outside Assisi. Renovated in then’90s, with gardens and terraces, doubles and triples, each different from the next, and books everywhere. Evenings, we go into Assisi for ice cream and the gentle hum of piazza life with its impromptu concerts, classical and jazz. Assisi, and the great Roman and medieval art it contains, becomes home to students.
Our 2026 play is Twelfth Night, perfect for students of this age (14-18). The central theme of the play is the confusion love can create within us. Characters fall in love with the wrong person or fail to realize who they really love and this makes them question and rethink their own identities.
Students travel widely in Italy to experience firsthand the Italian Renaissance and Roman art which shaped Shakespeare's world view.

HS: Shakespeare 2026 will run from July 18th to August 15th and cost 4,600 USD. Cost includes room and board (except for one dinner out, each week), entrance fees to all museums and sites we visit together, tickets to plays and other events, travel within Italy and the UK. Students should fly into London on July 18h and fly out of Rome on August 15th. We will pick everyone up at their airport in London , accompany them to the Fiumicino airport in Rome and make sure they are on their flight back home!