Tales from Villa Adriana
A collective book of stories set in Hadrian’s Villa
Writing well means being understood by someone who was not there. The programme develops this skill starting from Hadrian’s Villa, the residence of the emperor Hadrian near Tivoli. Each participant is assigned a place in the villa, reconstructs its history through sources and images, and then narrates it in the first person, in the role of one of the emperor’s companions: the story is invented, the references are documented. The text is then read by a classmate, who makes a drawing of it; where the drawing does not match the author’s intention, the text is revised.
- School level
- Lower secondary school · Primary school
- Age
- 8-13 years old
- Structure
- 12 hours · 6 sessions
- The outcome
- A bound volume of the class’s stories, one place in the villa per page, presented by the participants at an event open to the public.
Bringing this programme to your school
A twenty-minute conversation, with no commitment, is enough to agree on the calendar, the number of sessions and how to adapt the programme to the classes involved.