Semester Programs

ITALIAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
MUSIC, VOICE & OPERA
DRAWING & PAINTING
DANCE

Accademia Europea di Firenze (AEF) is Florence School of Liberal, Performing Arts, Italian Language and Culture. Located in the heart of the city, it hosts a community of students, professionals, faculty and staff, promoting a uniquely inspiring educational environment. Our study abroad students share classes and activities with other students from various nationalities, in an environment of intercultural exchange, academic excellence, cultural and social immersion and experiential learning.

Living and Learning in Florence as a Florentine

Study, live, experience. Build your life-changing experience in the birthplace of the Renaissance.
This unique city has always inspired the thoughts and creations of artists and travelers: Galileo, Leonardo, Machiavelli, Brunelleschi, Dante, Donatello are just some of the great minds that have walked the same streets that our students stroll through today, surrounded by beauty everywhere they go - a daily nourishment for their learning path. This is how every single formative opportunity becomes part of a global cultural experience, from Art History lessons to cooking classes. Everything connects and acquires meaning. Florence is the place where experiential learning becomes real and where students are truly immersed in the cultural and social context.
AEF students will not only have Florence as the most extraordinary of classrooms, but will also learn inside the rooms of Palazzo Niccolini, a historical building dating back to the 16th century and home to a famous Italian dramatist, Giovan Battista Niccolini. As a student at AEF, your learning experience is therefore a combination of lectures in the beautiful frescoed rooms of the school, onsite-classes around the city and in Tuscany, engaging activities and authentic cultural immersion. Florence becomes your home; you will live in typical apartments within a walking distance from the school, so that you can experience Florentine everyday-life like a real Italian. You will not be a tourist, but a citizen of Florence, even if only for a short time.

Florence as a classroom

We are proud and very lucky to have the whole city as a great classroom available to us and to our students. An open-air museum, a pop-up art book, a miracle of beauty and harmony; but Florence is much more: it is a living and breathing place, in which the word culture acquires a wider meaning, which include our  life style and the very idea of humanism. For all these reasons, which are deeply rooted in our identity as Italians and educators, we have developed a program that combines classroom and on-site lessons, workshops, cultural and voluntary activities, as well as an intense program of performances and exhibitions in prestigious venues  and locations in the city. So that the Study Abroad experience may be a real moment of personal and intellectual growth for young travelers of the contemporary Grand Tour.

Location

Florence is a medium-sized city, perfect for walking , and everything is at hand. All the main sights can easily be reached by foot - including our school: Palazzo Niccolini, home of AEF, is located in Via Cavour, heart of the city center, between Piazza del Duomo and Piazza San Marco. The Palace was built in the 16th century, when Via Cavour was still called Via Larga and had been chosen by the Medici family as the main area of economic and financial development of the city. In the 19th century, Giovan Battista Niccolini, an important Florentine dramatist, after whom the Teatro located in Via Ricasoli is also named, made it his home until his death in 1861. Recently restored and equipped with the most modern technologies, Palazzo Niccolini is now the ideal educational environment for students, artists and musicians from all over the world. A Palace of the Arts in the City of the Arts.