Join Us in Spoleto, Italy—Charleston’s Sister City!

For over a decade, students from the College of Charleston have spent parts of May and June in Spoleto, Italy – Charleston’s famous sister city. In this stunning hilltop town with ancient roots anchoring the Umbrian valley, students will experience great food and gorgeous views as they study and develop both traditional and digital travel content for print and social media. 

Students will stay in apartment-style accommodations at Residence Villa Tota in downtown Spoleto. The experience includes Italian language and culture sessions before departure and in Spoleto, a day trip to Assisi and an overnight trip to Rome, and a range of excursions including truffle hunting, a winery experience, and a cooking class with a master chef. Students will also enjoy three group dinners and a catered lunch on class days (twice a week) in addition to the meals that are included in each excursion.

The two courses offered provide credits toward the College’s general education requirement, and they also count for various ways towards a range of English minors and concentrations. Students will also be allowed to travel over a long free weekend as they discover Italy for themselves!

A generous range of scholarships of up to $2,000 are available through CofC’s Center for International Education. Please check with your individual department or school for additional scholarship opportunities. And don’t hesitate to contact Prof. Kathy Béres Rogers, the program director, if you have any questions. This year, we are partnering with a study-abroad support non-profit called Academic Experiences Abroad to help with orientation and international safety protocol and 24/7support, as well as our long-standing Spoleto-based tour provider and site coordinator, Love Umbria.

Pre-Departure Items. You can find planning and packing tips here, and I have included the draft daily itinerary will be available soon!

Our Partners

Cristiana Fittucia with Love Umbria has been our tour provider in Spoleto from the very beginning. She arranges all our tours, accompanies us on numerous outings, and she and her team offer 24-7 emergency support if we run into any issues.

A Spoleto native, Cristiana always enjoys sharing the secret of Umbria with students from her sister city!

Program Fee TBA: (doesn’t include flights or tuition, subject to change).

Are you an out-of-state student? You only have to pay in-state tuition for our courses!

The program fee does not include tuition or air travel, which students will arrange for themselves. The program director will let students know his flight details in case students would like to join the same flight. Students are welcome to extend their stay in Italy or beyond at the conclusion of the program.

Please note that this program includes a good deal of walking–both to class, and on various excursions. The terrain in Italy is hilly, which can be strenuous for some.

The Courses: Literature and Travel Writing

ENGL 339: Immersive Writing of Place & Culture Prof. Matty Glasgow (glasgowml@cofc.edu)

During your residency in Spoleto, you’ll no doubt experience boundless awe, pleasure, reverence, and inspiration from your immersion in Italian culture and place. In this course, you’ll embark on expressing these emotional resonances and intellectual curiosities through poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—distilling the art, history, ecology, food, landscape, and all you observe around you into language uniquely your own.

We’ll read and dabble in both traditional and contemporary Italian literary forms. We’ll practice ekphrasis in modern art museums. We’ll indulge in (eco)somatic writing inspired by the foods, vistas, and sensations of Umbria. Our writing community will take part in creative workshops and thoughtful discussions on how we as writers perceive and render place across literary genres. Ultimately, you’ll produce a creative assemblage or collage of your writing, photographs, and artwork that serves as an intentional artifact of your time in Spoleto and our shared experience of travel. 

ENGL 362: Death and Immortality in Romantic Italy
Prof. Kathy Béres Rogers (RogersKB@cofc.edu)

John Keats spent his final days in Italy, dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25.  In his poetry, he explores themes of death (he had studied medicine and knew that arterial blood was his “death sentence”) and immortality.  What remains of us when we are gone, and why does this matter for the study of literature, and of palliative care?  Keats was not the only poet to entertain these matters at length; Percy Bysshe Shelley also writes extensively about immortality and, famously, he memorialized Keats in his elegy “Adonais.”  Finally, Mary Shelley, who lost Percy (who died at age 29 in Lerici, Italy), explores death and grief in her postapocalyptic The Last Man.  In this class, we will watch the movie Bright Star and read about Keats, the Shelleys, and their time in Italy.  Then we will read their literature and, finally, take a trip to Rome to see the manuscripts on display at the Keats-Shelley House.

Meet the Faculty

Matty Glasgow, Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. He is the author of deciduous qween (Red Hen Press, 2019), and his creative work explores the intersection of queerness, environment, and identity. Matty teaches poetry and creative nonfiction, and his academic interests include queer theory, ecopoetics, camp aesthetics, and experimental forms that arise from the fissures between genres.

Kathleen Béres Rogers is a Professor in the College of Charleston Department of English; she also directs and designed the College’s Program in Medical Humanities, is a faculty affiliate with Women’s and Gender Studies, and serves as a member of the Women’s Health Research Team.  In addition to designing the program in Medical Humanities, Kathy implemented the College’s Neurodiversity Initiative, which now functions as a student group.  Her publications range from her 2019 Creating Romantic Obsession: Scorpions in the Mind (Palgrave) to articles in Review of English Studies, Prose Studies, Women’s Writing, and Service Learning in Literary Studies. She is currently working on a monograph concerning cognitive disability in Romantic-era narratives.  

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