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By Larry B. Dendy
ldendy@uga.edu
Cementing a 30-year relationship with the city of Cortona, Italy, the university has signed a 12-year lease on a building that will provide permanent classroom and studio space for UGA’s popular study-abroad program in Cortona.
The lease, which includes a purchase option, allows UGA to strengthen a program that has brought more than 4,000 American students to the scenic hill town in historic Tuscany to study art, architecture and other subjects.
UGA President Michael F. Adams and other UGA officials were in Cortona recently to join with Cortona Mayor Emanuele Rachini and other local officials in signing the lease and cutting a ribbon to dedicate Villa Severini, a two-story structure built in 1937 that formerly was a school.
The 7,000-square-foot building, located on a three-quarter-acre tract within the walls surrounding Cortona, is being renovated to provide teaching and studio space. The building has a patio for open-air work and will contain a small library and a computer lab for computer-based graphic work. UGA will pay $22,500 (U.S.) annually to lease the space.
“The Severini building provides not only more physical space but also more suitable space for year-round programming in Cortona,” says Carmon Colangelo, director of UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. “It is adjacent to a major portion of our current space for sculpture, ceramics and metalwork, and it will contain studio classrooms for photography, drawing and painting, printmaking, papermaking, book arts, environmental and interior design andart history.”
Cortona--a 2,700-year-old city set on a hillside amid terraced fields of olives, wheat and sunflowers--has been the site of UGA’s study-abroad program in art since 1970. Retired art professor Jack Kehoe started the program as a summer experience for UGA students to study drawing, painting and architecture.
Cortona is an ideal place for art education. Tuscany is the birthplace of the Renaissance, and Cortona offers Etruscan, Roman, medieval and Renaissance art and architecture, and is within day-trip distance of Florence, Bologna and Siena.
Some 200 students annually attend classes offered in fall, spring and summer semesters and the May session. In addition to instruction in art and art-related subjects, the program also includes courses in Italian language and culture, philosophy, creative writing and women’s studies.
R.G. Brown, a faculty member in the art school, has been director of the Cortona program for the past two years. Aurelia Ghezzi has been associate director almost from the time the program began.
In addition to Adams and Rachini, those attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony included Colangelo; Kehoe and his wife, Marilyn; Wyatt Anderson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Hilarion Martinez, from the U.S. Consulate in Florence; and Frances Mayes, author of the best-seller Under the Tuscan Sun.
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