Study in Venice
Posted On 05-08-2025
William - or Will, as he wanted us to call him - is a student from Australia who came to Venice with some previous knowledge about the city and its history that you usually do not expect from someone who comes from the other side of the world. He thought that some weeks in Venice may help him learn more about the relationship between the city and its lagoon, and the environmental challenges that its inhabitants have faced throughout the centuries. It all started thanks to a Venetian wellhead in his hometown in Australia...
Hi William! Can you please tell us something about yourself?
Of course! I am 25, from Melbourne in Australia, and I have recently finished my Honours year at the University of Melbourne in History. Apart from this, my interests are going out into nature either by hiking or camping (we are very lucky in Australia in this respect), reading a good book in a cosy armchair, or watching films, plays, and musicals with my partner. I love anything and everything historical, so this course in Venice was pretty much the perfect fit!
If I'm not mistaken, you already had a special interest in Venice, do you mind telling us?
For my honours thesis last year, I investigated an antique wellhead that was part of the university’s art collection, trying to establish a provenance and from there writing a cultural biography of its life. Based on the wellhead’s decoration, condition, and historical circumstance, I appraised it to be a replica of a Venetian vera da pozzo (wellhead)—of which many examples can be found in the campi (squares) and cortile (inner garden) of Venice! (Once you notice them, you can’t miss them!) My research led me to some interesting places: hydraulic infrastructure, water politics, the ‘Myth of Venice’, foreign representations of Venice, and mass tourism to the city. I believed the pozzi (cisterns) had a story to tell about Venetians’ adaptation to, and coexistence with, their lagoon environment. This is at the heart of my special interest in Venice.
What led you to enrol in the summer school?
The ‘Shape of Water’ program fit almost perfectly with my research interests. There are well-embedded traditions around the ‘Anthropocene’ and environmental histories in Australia, and through my research for my thesis I encountered a few works (incidentally by some of the professors we met during the course) that explored these themes as they applied to Venice. In April, my old supervisor actually emailed me the flyer for the summer school, and I applied immediately. I wanted to hone my understanding of the symbiotic, interconnected, and complex relationships between humans and their environment. And what place is better to do this than Venice?
How was living in Venice?
Living in Venice was amazing. There is a rhythm to this city that I have never felt anywhere else. You walk wherever you need to go, you get lost, you find hidden gems in every calle (street)—every trip from my front door felt like its own little adventure. And the silence! Only when I went to Bologna after the course had ended did I realise how little I missed the sound of cars. Everything I needed was very close: a bakery for my morning coffee and croissant, a bar for my lunch, a trattoria for the nights I was not out with my classmates, a supermarket three minutes’ walk away. It was nice to visit these places day after day and be recognised by the people there—I was able to practice my Italian a lot thanks to them! It really was a truly unique experience living in this city.
Can you tell us about a funny experience you had?
On one of the final days of the summer school, we had a drumming circle. Now, I had never done anything like this in my life on my own, let alone with a whole group of people. I don’t think I was alone, so we were all in this together. The cowbell came out and, after a few taps, we had our first beat. It was chaos, beautiful chaos. Things got especially wild when some of our classmates got a go with the conductor’s cow bell. With it they could control the pitch and rhythm all or some of the players. My favourite moments were when we all collectively lost the plot and just banged on those drums to make noise for noise’s sake. It was a lot of fun.
And what about something you were not expecting from the summer school?
The multi-disciplinarity of the Summer School meant that we explored a diversity of approaches to the central themes of the subject, some of which were quite unexpected on my part. The biggest surprise was our walking assignment. We were given the task to set aside an hour for a walk through the city. We were to listen to a podcast and take a photo whenever we felt like it of the ground (without our feet) and the sky (without buildings). It was a deeply mindful experience. I felt like I got to know something about the city not through studying it, but by experiencing it. And, some of the photos that my classmates took were breathtaking. Hearing about others’ experiences with the task only enriched it more: some chose to walk without the recording, some chose specific parts of the city, others focused on the photography aspect of the task. Each of us got something of our own out of the task. Who knew something so simple in one way could be so profound in another?
What did you do at the end of the summer school?
I decided to stay a few extra days in Venice after the summer school finished. I am a little bit of a nerd, so I spent a couple of those days researching in the library of the Iuav University of Venice and, very excitingly, the Biblioteca Marciana—where I accessed a rare book from the reading room. The other couple of days I spent travelling around: I visited Bologna one day with Lisa, another student of the Summer School; and returned to Burano to do some gift shopping. I was very glad to take these extra days to digest what I had learnt, and to begin channelling that into my own creative pursuits. Byron did, after all, call Venice ‘the greenest island of my imagination’—I don’t think he was wrong!
Do you have any suggestions for those students who will decide to attend the summer school next year?
To future students of the Summer School I would say: leave your expectations at the door! The beauty and value of this experience is that it is open for you to make of it however you feel you can. The multi-disciplinary nature of class and course challenges the way you think, it opens you to new ways of expressing what you know, and exposes you to different ways of answering the same questions. I feel like if you set your expectations too early and go on this trip with them too close to heart, then you rob yourself of the truly mercurial nature of Venice and the enriching diversity of the different classes that you will undertake as part of the course.