2025 Tours and workshops
The Vergilian Society is offering these tours for 2025.
For more detailed information about a tour, please contact the tour director. Scholarships are available for all tours. Registration for the 2025 season will begin in September 2024. Email vergiliansociety@gmail.com with any questions.
Renaissance and Baroque Art in Rome and Naples
June 16-27, 2025 Director: Andrew Casper
This tour will explore major achievements and developments in Renaissance and Baroque Art (1300-1700) in Rome and Naples. Focusing on these two cities will allow tour participants to study both major works and monuments in Rome as well as some lesser known (but no less significant) sites in Naples. This will allow for an especially rich examination of key artistic developments in painting, sculpture, and architecture that fall both within and outside of the conventional canon, but all of which constitute some of the most celebrated, innovative, and influential artistic achievements in the Western world. The chosen cities of Rome and Naples also provide other notable advantages. First, their convenient proximity to each other will reduce the total travel time. Second, despite their differing political histories the two cities share mutual commonalities and influences in their respective artist cultures that will ensure some cohesion to the various sites and monuments that we will visit.
View the itinerary. Click "Sign Up Now" for cost and application.
Contact the Director: Andrew Casper
Ancient France
June 23 - July 3, 2025 Directors: Raymond Capra and Thomas Garvey
This tour of Southern France will explore the interaction of three cultures: Gallic, Greek, and Roman, through a study of the archaeology and history of France beginning with the civilization of the iron age Gauls and the establishment of Greek cities at the end of the seventh century BC through the advent of Republican Roman colonization and the campaigns of Caesar to the end of Roman Hegemony. The archaeological sites, accompanying museums, and the grand Catholic cathedrals of the region we shall visit are located on the ancient trade routes that developed into the Roman road system in Gaul, most notably the Via Domitia.
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Contact the Directors: Raymond Capra and Thomas Garvey.
Celje river walk
Pannonia: On the Amber Route in Roman Pannonia, in Vienna, Western Hungary, and Slovenia
June 29 - July 13, 2025 Director: Beverly Berg
From prehistoric times a trade route brought Baltic amber down to the Mediterranean. Once across the Danube the route in Roman times carried Nero's favorite gemstone through the province of Upper Pannonia, acquired in the time of Augustus and Tiberius. Fortresses, veteran colonies, trading towns with inhabitants from various corners of the Empire, and toll stations manned by Syrians developed along the route. Our journey discovering their remains passes through eastern Austria, western Hungary, and Slovenia. As a bonus, we stay in two of Europe's most beautiful capital cities, imperial Vienna and folkloric Ljubljana, and see several of the most picturesque and unspoiled storybook towns of Central Europe.
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Contact the Director: Beverly Berg
Social Justice in the Latin Classroom: A Tour for High School Teachers
June 30 - July 10, 2025 Director: Ian Lockey
This tour is intended to help Latin teachers engage their students in social justice issues that affect their everyday lives. The discipline of Classics celebrates a rich culture and history of peoples in the ancient Mediterranean, but also carries with it a complicated history associated with modern colonialism, enslavement, and the development of scientific racism. This makes the Latin classroom a surprisingly rich environment to study social justice topics. During this tour, teachers will be provided with resources to teach individual lessons, larger units, and yearlong courses that engage students with Latin texts from a wide range of authors and time periods, academic and blog articles that encourage deep classroom discussions, projects that focus on various identities in the ancient world, Classical reception studies, and service, a folder filled with over 100 texts with commentaries and vocabulary lists. The materials focus on gender, sexuality, race, imperialism, and disability. After morning sessions in the classroom, participants will then visit major sites in Rome and the Bay of Naples where, after a tour, we will think about how the archaeological materials and museum artifacts could be put to use in crafting lessons.
View the itinerary. Click "Sign Up Now" for cost and application.
Contact the Director: Ian Lockey
Vergil and Pliny in Italy: an AP Latin Teacher Workshop
July 10 - 21, 2025 Directors: Amy Leonard and Steve Tuck
This workshop will directly address the new AP Latin curriculum which will go into effect in the fall of 2025. As hundreds of high school AP Latin teachers will be redesigning their curricula to align with the new College Board requirements, this workshop will meet the needs of many who are unfamiliar with the texts, course guidelines, and exam format. The primary works on the syllabus are Vergil’s Aeneid and selected letters of Pliny the Younger. The workshop will spend three days in Rome and eight days at the Villa Vergiliana. In addition to visits to sites relevant to both the required and supplemental texts, six morning classroom sessions are included to help teachers plan and prepare for the new syllabus. A feature of the workshop will be integrated on-site Latin readings.
Please contact the tour directors for price.
Director Biographies:
Amy Leonard has taught Latin in the Atlanta area since 2004 after receiving her masters degree in Latin from the University of Georgia. She currently teaches at Midtown High School where the Latin program boasts 300+ students. She has won teaching awards from CAMWS and the Georgia Classical Association. She has participated as an AP Latin reader since 2013 and currently serves on the AP Latin Development Committee. She is a consultant for the National Latin Exam and chairs the CAMWS teaching awards committee. In addition to co-directing six Vergilian Society tours for high school teachers, she served as a trustee for the Society from 2011-2014, the Second Vice President from 2017-2020, and currently serves as the secretary for the Society.
Steven L. Tuck is Professor of History and Classics at Miami University. He has directed over 20 study tours and teacher workshops in Italy and Greece. He is the author of A History of Roman Art and many articles and chapters on Roman art. He also publishes on the lives of the sub-elites in the Roman world. Further work, using both sculpture and inscriptions, focuses on spectacle entertainments in the Roman world. He has recorded 5 courses for The Great Courses and received 9 awards for undergraduate teaching including the Archaeological Institute of America Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award. He is a former President of the Vergilian Society.
View the itinerary. Click "Sign Up Now" for cost and application.
Contact the Directors: Steven L. Tuck and Amy Leonard
Kind Words from Students
Although very excited, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I departed for Campania. However, I had an amazing trip and my time at the Villa Vergiliana will undoubtedly influence my future teaching in a variety of ways.
Lottie Mortimer
“Tomorrow I will go home, and back at school, I will tell my fellow teachers about the Villa Vergiliana. We will try to work out some plans to involve a study trip in our program of internationaliz-ation at our school. I really hope this will be possible.
Marian Heesen
“I return to Oxford ready to evangelise about Villa Vergiliana and all it represents, and sincerely hope to return, this time bringing a school party so I can share with my pupils and colleagues what I have experienced.