07/10/2026
Last Tuesday, our Democracies and Democratization class traded the classroom for Florence! 🚄📖🇮🇹
Our students visited the European University Institute (EUI), one of Europe’s leading centers for research on politics, law, economics, and European integration. For students studying democracy and political change, getting a behind-the-scenes look at where scholars and researchers work with European archives and documents made the course material feel very real.
And the setting? Pretty extraordinary. 🏛️
We toured Villa Salviati, the EUI’s historic home, including its fascinating grotte: a peculiar network of underground spaces decorated with stones, shells, and architectural details typical of Renaissance and Mannerist garden design.
From learning how researchers access EU archival documents to exploring a centuries-old Florentine villa now at the heart of contemporary European research — this was definitely a classroom with a view.
Italy is the classroom. 🇮🇹