Recent high school and college graduates are studying some of the world’s historic arts and trades at a new school run by St Peter’s Basilica. Source: National Catholic Register.
The School of Arts and Crafts of the Fabbrica di San Pietro – the department that oversees maintenance, restoration, and repairs of the Vatican’s papal basilica – is offering for the third year a free, six-month training course with a concentration in one of five traditional crafts: stone and marble work, bricklaying and plastering, carpentry, blacksmithing, and mosaic design.
“It is important for the basilica to have this school, because it restores a tradition from the 1700s, putting it at the centre of [the basilica’s] life today,” the school’s director, Fr Francesco Occhetta, SJ said.
“Which is why,” the priest added, “this alliance of hands, head, and heart, today, has revived something that was dying in the culture over the last 30 years.”
“The school is first and foremost an experience of relationships for the 20 young men and women living together and learning – in the basilica – about the maintenance of the basilica, through the skills of our craftsmen. We pass on these skills to them, so that the generations, holding hands, pass on that knowledge that can be passed on only from one generation to the next,” Fr Occhetta said.
For the students, the rare chance to receive a hands-on education in a trade or craft in Rome was a big appeal of the school.
“I’d always been interested in an artistic career, and I had already decided that I did not want to pursue a career that required me to be on the computer all day; I knew I wanted to work with my hands,” Cristina Squatriti, 22, told CNA.
The Italian-American from Ann Arbor, Michigan, joined 19 other students, mostly Italians aged 18–25, to study at the Vatican from November 2024 to April 2025.
Fr Occhetta said participants spend 600 hours learning from masters in the trades involved in the regular and extraordinary maintenance of St Peter’s Basilica – 200 hours in a classroom and 400 hours in a lab.
The Vatican basilica has already hired two of its former students as part of the Sanpietrini, the full-time St Peter’s maintenance crew, and hopes to also do so in the future, whenever possible.
FULL STORY
Students Use ‘Hands, Head, and Heart’ to Learn Dying Trades at Vatican Art School (Hannah Brockhaus, CNA via National Catholic Register)
