For someone of my generation, the months between school and the university would spend mainly colliding around Asia with a backpack and a lonely guide to the planet, grabbing down to Fleap hostels and calling home when the money was over. Even today, most gap wishes lists tend to include free adventures in remote destinations.
For those with tools, however, there is a much higher alternative. Yeardo for the last six decades, a group of young people, many of them the sciences of good British families, have chosen to spend part of their year of gap by soaking the aesthetic praise of Italy’s courtesy in the John Hall Venice course. Founded in 1965 by John Hall, then an English teacher at King’s School Canterbury, and is now run by his son Charlie, the course is described on his website as “a great cultural mind”.
In terms of depth and width, John Hall Venice certainly puts most of other cultural tours under shade. The itinerary, which costs £ 14,560, begins with a week of induction in London (normally at the end of January) when receiving the year of 30-40 students are prepared for the holiday waiting for them with general presentations of art and history evaluation. The group then declares in Venice, its home base for the next five weeks, where excursions depart for Ravenna, Rome, Florence and Siena.
Exclusive visits are cast in galleries and museums, hats and cathedrals; Optional classes are offered in drawing of life, cooking and spoken Italian. But the program of the program is its lecture series, given by a distinguished list of scholars and experts and covers a large number of cultural land, art and architecture in history, philosophy, music and cinema, climate science and astrophysics.
I cling to the students towards the end of their week in London. With a happy coincidence, the first lecture I attend, in a large room at the contemporary arts institute that oversees St. James Park, is on the subject of the 18th and 19th centuries Grand, when exposure to landscapes and cultures of Southern European was part of a Genteel English education. As described by Jeremy Howard, a lecturer in art history at the University of Buckingham, the parallels are so obvious that there is barely irony. The former big tourists were traveling, howard tells us, in order to “spend a good time with daddy’s expenses before they settled to run their assets and unite in governing classes.
The course is slightly published, but deeper you dig within a certain layer of English society, the more wider it seems to be known. Among the 2,500 Alumni are great and good figures in the UK art sector such as singer Emma Kirkby, conductor Jane Glover, modern curator Tate Matthew Gale and former National Gallery director Sir Nicholas Penny.
Later that day, a reunification cocktail at the passenger club in Pal Mall is a chance to meet past and current students, including a group of four alumni who were in the first John Hall appearance in 1965 and remained friends. One of them, retired Judge Sir Michael Burton, was the first of the three generations to “make the course”, followed by his four daughters, and his nephew Carmi, who is one of 2025’s taking. “I was 18 years old at the time, and it was a full” wow “. My life was changed from it,” she says.
The next day, I accompany the group as he goes to Venice, arriving in the late afternoon. I half excluded the city to shake in the fog and a vague sense of worry. On the contrary, those who greet us are the winter, cloudless, calm winter days. At this time of the year, Venice is as close to the tourist as it can ever be in the 21st century. Gondolas, tied in rows for winter, gently slide into the green-blue water. Locals drink their sprouts Aperol on the terraces in the open air, apparently enjoying this brief relief from a tourist lubrication.
Together with students, who share rooms between two or three, I am settled in a small hotel, a three stars led by the family alongside the Kanal in a quiet part of Dorsoduro. The lectures are held 10 minutes away at Istituto Canossiano, with classes outside a central Spanish courtyard. I see John Hall students broadcast in the lecture room, mainly English (though there are some Dutch, two Canadians and one American) and with only seven boys for 23 daughters. Some of them have notebooks, though there is no need for homework and no exams: in essence the course is about the pleasure of learning for their own sake.
“Who has heard of Byzantium?” Ask Rebecca Darley, Associate Professor of History at Leeds University, starting her conversation about Ravenna’s mosaics (which students will see next week). Almost all hands go up. Darley’s lecture tone is fun, however there is no hint of condensation or dirt. Next is the historian and author of art Nigel McGilchrist, who speaks to us with commitment to sensuality in the Renaissance marble sculpture. “Just look at this David from Bernin: this is so dynamic, it is clear someone who lives. Bernin really pushes the material at the border,” he says.
“That was extraordinary,” makes a boy for his friends as they depart from the lecture room to grab some pizza in Campo Santa Margherita.
That evening I sit with professor At a table in Osteria wants Torri, where dinner is taken every night at 7.30 fast. Do students know before, I wonder aloud? “Some of them do, from dinner holidays and points to the point. They are all swimming in the same social pool, “replies Charlie Hall, a three-piece avuncular figure, who took over when his father pulled into a farm house in Central Italy. Over Ricotta mattellini and porchetta, Hall arranges us with anecdotes in 1987 Decompled somewhere between France and Italy, and another that was put into a fountain and was briefly arrested.
The next morning Gregory Dowling, a lecturer and resident of the University of Venice in the city for 44 years, runs the group on a way out. It shows the gloomy canal alley, where Donald Sutherland meets the red dwarf dressed in Don’t look now – A movie that, he appears, none of the students has seen. “Now I would like you to prepare yourself for one of Europe’s big spectacles,” he announces as we round the corner of Calle Dept de l’mensimi in St. Mark’s Square.
“The light, the colors. . . And not having any traffic, “enthusiastizing the Eadie, previously of the Bradfield school, will soon study the art history in Durham.
Their parents can pay, but most of these young people are serious about wanting John Hall course to lead to something in later life, even if it is just an awareness raised for the great European cultural tradition.
Alexander Dunluse, an old Eonian, is looking beyond the lagoon towards San Giorgio Maggiore in the yellow winter light. “I thought it could be a good idea to” cultivate “, and now I have the feeling that I will be another person when that is over,” he smiles.
That night we return to St. Mark for a visit that is impressive even according to the course standards: there will be no one else in the basilica, but itself. The lights are lit in full power and suddenly we are turning on 8,000 square meters of medieval mosaics, shining with gold and lazuli lapis. Had it not been so exciting and aesthetically, English anti-circular Patrick Craig then sings an aria from an Oratorio Handel, his powerful voice echoing between domes and columns. “I’ve already decided to be getting married here,” whisper a girl with her neighbor.
Later, on the cold clear night I return to the hotel. As I pass Campo Santa Margherita, there are students, shaking me from behind the Orange grass window, where a karaoke session is in full motion. From the summits of Western culture to an attack on a student grass, they have quite literally, the time of their lives.
Detail
Paul Richardson was a guest of the course of John Hall Venice (Johnhallvenice.com). Course of 2026 goes from January 26 to March 13
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