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The Winter School offers students a unique opportunity to spend the winter term in Italy in a program designed to provide a stimulating, multi-disciplinary foundation for programs in Arts and beyond. While it is especially designed for first and second year students, students in any year of their undergraduate program are eligible to apply.

Exchange the lecture hall for small seminars, intensive feedback and experiential learning through field trips and inspiring visiting speakers in the mentorship series, while making life-long friendships.

Students take a minimum of three courses. Through these courses, students discover how enduring ideas equip us to better understand our world and the challenges of the future.

The centrepiece of the academic program is the 3C seminar: Critical Thinking, Creativity and Complexity. This core seminar, which all students take, ties the themes of the courses together. It helps students build crucial skills of critical thinking, complex problem solving, writing and making interdisciplinary connections. Small class sizes, interaction and intensive feedback allow students to develop these essential skills. 

You don't have to speak Italian to study in Cortona. The courses are taught in English and a conversational Italian course helps students learn enough to get by and introduces students to Italian culture. All of the courses are ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ courses, so there is no need to arrange for transfer credits.

Winter 2026

All Cortona courses include field trips.

INT D 225 Capstone Seminar: Great Transformations 

All students take this interdisciplinary core seminar. This course is about transformations that are reshaping our world.  Using the examples of climate change and the digital revolution, we examine fundamental questions such as the future of nature, the distinction between the natural and the artificial, and what it means to manipulate our environment to save ourselves. We draw examples from across centuries, including the environmental origins of Rome, the interplay between science and art during Galileo’s time in Florence and the innovation of Olivetti’s computing project to highlight aspects of transformation and questions of how we make meaning in our changing world and how we shape and transform our identities.  We develop the tools to help us identify interconnections, make comparisons across space and time and become more aware of and curious about the sources of and nature of our personal transformations through the study abroad experience. This class includes field trips to Florence and Rome.

HADVC 211 Renaissance City

Dr. Marco Pacioni

In 1347-1351, the Black Death, a widespread and catastrophic epidemic, created economic,
social and religious upheaval across Europe. It is from this disaster that the Renaissance city emerged. What is the Renaissance city and why is it important? New structures such as wide and straight streets, palaces, offices, gardens, fountains, theatres and villas appeared in the landscape and created the modern forms that in many cases we can still experience in today’s cities. The course will focus on the cultural background, the architecture and the arts that contributed to the Renaissance city, as well as on the social changes that occurred in it. Field trips to Florence, Rome and Ferrara, as well as on-site lessons at Cortona will allow us to observe the original structures of the Renaissance City and compare them with the components of today’s cities.

CLASS 399 The Archaeology of Ancient Italy

Dr. Helena Fracchia 

Ancient Italy was characterized by three particular cultures:  the Etruscans in Central Italy, the Indigenous peoples in the inland centre and south of Italy, and by Greek colonies planted along the Southern coastline.    The typical aspects of those three cultures, the Etruscans in the area of Tuscany, the indigenous peoples in the interior of the South and the Greek colonies along the Southern coastline and the ways in which those cultures influenced what would become the dominant culture in Italy, that of the Romans, are the topic of this course.   

How will we tie these different cultures and sites together and, in the end, bring us to Roman Italy?  The thread that connects these different cultures together and then brings us to Rome itself is the question of settlement and eventually urban development, that is the city.  The city is one of man’s greatest achievements and it is the stage of human activity that humans create for themselves. We usually think of the Greek and Roman city with a grid plan and we consider that plan typical of democratic cities.  But the Greek colonial population and the indigenous populations of ancient Italy had a different social and political structure: their settlement development reflects those very different sociopolitical and socioeconomic situations. Thus, the city is an expression of every aspect of the identity of a culture and every aspect of a city establishes and reinforces societal norms, ethics and values.  Archaeology is the study of the progressive human development and thus the evolution of the city becomes the perfect case study to understand how the pre Roman cultures of ancient Italy express their own  cultural identity and then how the Romans fuse all the aspects of these different cultures together in their own cities .   

This course includes a two-night field trip, first to the sites of Greek Poseidonia / Paestum and Lucanian indigenous Roccagloriosa and then to Pompeii and Herculaneum, which will provide an excellent overview of Roman Italy in the 1^st c. AD. On the field trip we will also consider why and how modern society uses museums and ancient sites to express a chosen cultural and historical identity.

 INT D 325 St. Francis, Giotto, Dante: Nature and art in the late medieval city

Dr. Marco Pacioni

After experiencing an uninterrupted urban expansion from the 11^th to the 13^th century, medieval cities in Italy were at the peak of their power. Both physically and metaphorically, ever-expanding city walls separated the institutions of the commune, corporations and banks, symbols of wealth, power and political legitimacy, from the nature beyond it.  In Cortona and beyond, the arrival of the mendicant order of the Franciscans, with their deep ecological commitment and rejection of material wealth, challenged the values of the late medieval city, reshaping cities, society and culture in profound ways.  This course explores the metamorphosis that occurred in the civic and urban forms of late medieval cities as a result of the radical new Franciscan conception of nature and social life. The Franciscans built a medieval version of the social welfare state: churches and convents,  hospitals, hostels, microcredit banks and sororities and fraternities devoted to the care of others.  In the cultural realm, we explore how the Franciscan conception of nature influences Cimabue and Giotto’s naturalistic proto-renaissance artistic style and Dante Alighieri’s radical conception of love and politics.  As a city reshaped by the Franciscans, including the Franciscan architect Frate Elia and the city’s unofficial patron saint, St. Margherita, Cortona offers a unique opportunity to study and document the influence of the new Franciscans’ ideas and the way in which they are expressed through the work of artists as Giotto and poets as Dante. Field trips include Assisi and Ravenna.

INT D 125 Introduction to Italian Language and Culture

Roberto Bondi

Through this introduction to Italian culture, you will gain the basic skills to communicate
effectively in your daily interactions and a better appreciation of the similarities and differences between Italy and Canada. You will also gain an appreciation of modern Italian culture. Learn about the ‘real’ Italy and how to not only survive but thrive as you go to classes. Field trips will be to Perugia and Chiusi.

WGS 298 Women and Power in Italy and in the Mediterranean: from antiquity to today 

Dr. Eleonora Sandrelli

This course investigates and critically reflects on the evolution of the female figure and its relationship to power in Italy and the Mediterranean area over a broad historical period, from ancient Greece, Etruria, and Rome, through the Middle Ages, up to the Renaissance and contemporary times.  Gender equality, the symbolism of rank, participation in political and social life are just some of the peculiar aspects that the course intends to address and that, along with everyday life, can help provide an assessment of women’s power.

Students will examine everyday artifacts, signs of power, paintings, and different documents kept in the collections of the MAEC museum and in the Historical Library of Cortona. The course includes field trips to locations such as Florence and Bologna.