Avis sur Istituto Lorenzo de Medici (IDM)

If you are interested in meeting many other Americans while abroad, attending a school that is not very academically challenging or expensive in order to spend more time and money getting to know your Italian environment and culture, then this school is a good choice. Also, the school does have a pretty strong fine arts program, with many well-trained teachers. This is really the school's strong suit, as opposed to the liberal arts studies they also offer.

I enjoyed art history - every week there were walking trips to see the places and artistic pieces covered in the course. I also learned a lot from the extensive in-class work in my drawing and painting fine-art courses. Video production was good, too - each student group had the opportunity to produce two video shorts.

Improvements could first be made in two specific areas: 1) my History of Italian Literature course was perhaps the only one I felt was lacking, because it did not make use of engaging material or instruction either inside or outside the class. 2) my Italian language courses would have been much more effective if we had had textbooks to work with. Instead, instruction was mostly vocal - and in one class, half the time in English - which did not prove to be the most useful strategy for the majority of the class. In general, the courses weren't extremely rigorous, and there was hardly any homework - but this I deemed appropriate for a study abroad program, since students have so many other things to do while they are studying abroad as well - such as seeing the sights, trying to meet people and make friends, learn the language, and figure out everyday practical things such as grocery shopping, transportation, and communicating with a landlord! My most intensive courses were those of the fine arts - painting and drawing, in my case - which consisted of 9-hour labs with live models. This was a necessary amount of time to spend in order to get involved in the piece you were working on, so I appreciated it. These long classes also only met once a week - which allowed plenty of time to work on outside projects.

Definitely give it a try if you are interested in visual art but the other areas are lacking and I am sure there are more schools with better qualifications.

do not go for academic reasons...very unorganized...i chose them because they were the cheapest and that ended up not being a great reason too. The classes are a joke, a bad boring one and the advisors were a nightmare...