Last Wednesday, Villa Godiola received fifteen visitors from the Scuola Teatro Dimitri, which is located in the town of Verscio, in the southern Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. The Scuola Teatro Dimitri is currently touring its undergraduate program’s group thesis production, an adaptation of Dostoevskij’s short story “Bobok.”

The Summer Arts Program students met the Scuola Tetro Dimitri students over shared meals at the Villa on Wednesday. After dinner, the students from the two schools mingled both socially and professionally, with the Dimitri students leading an impromptu acrobatics jam in the Teatrino. The following day, the Dimitri students headed to Cortona and the Accademia dell’Arte students headed in to town for a workshop lead by Daniel Bausch at SpazioSeme.

That evening, the students were lucky enough to go on a field trip to the beautiful town of Cortona to see the production of “Bobok.”* Inspired but exhausted after returning back to the Villa close to midnight, the students went straight to bed, eager to discuss the show the following morning at breakfast.

The Dimitri students left the Villa on Friday to tour in Rome but returned on Sunday night as a kind of halfway point between Rome and Versico. While most of the Dimitri students went straight to bed after a long week of travel, the students got the chance to play with a few of them as a final hurrah on Sunday night.

For many of us at the Villa, it was sad to see them go early Monday morning—we’d grown attached in the little time we spent with them. Those brief friendships will be artistic points of contact to return to in the coming months and years, offering different opportunities to the students of the Summer Arts Program and the Scuola Teatro Dimitri, both here in Europe and on an intercontinental scale.

*Intern note: This author cannot resist noting here that “Bobok” was one of the best pieces of theatre she has seen in recent history. This is especially true because the theater in Cortona is very raked, meaning that the “upstage” space is actually higher than the “downstage” space. That the incredible acrobatic feats in “Bobok” were performed essentially on a hill does not cease to amaze me.