The 104th academic year has begun
The 104th academic year of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli was inaugurated with an official ceremony. Today, Monday 29 September 2025, the entire School gathered for a moment of celebration and sharing in a symbolic location in the town of Spilimbergo, the Chiesa dei Santi Giuseppe e Pantaleone (Church of Saints Joseph and Pantaleon), which houses a Via Crucis created by the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli in the 1960s and, outside, the most recent work, from 1999, Litania della Vergine (The Litany of the Virgin), based on a design by Mario Deluigi.
Present: President Stefano Lovison, Director Gian Piero Brovedani, together with the entire teaching and administrative staff of the School, the Mayor of Spilimbergo Enrico Sarcinelli, the parish priest of Spilimbergo Don Giorgio Bortolotto and some representatives of the seventy institutions that make up the Consortium for the Mosaic School of Friuli and, of course, the students of the School, the real protagonists of this important moment of participation and community. There are almost seventy of them, divided into the three courses that make up the training programme to become a Master Mosaicist. The students come from different parts of the world, confirming the international nature of the School for the 2025/2026 academic year. Young women and men have come from Poland, Russia, Romania, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Australia, Canada, Germany, Greece, Syria (there are about ten nationalities in the first courses alone) and, of course, from many regions of Italy: Puglia, Calabria, Tuscany, Lombardy, Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli Venezia Giulia. In short, this variety can only enrich an already rich and varied educational programme, which is always open to suggestions and stimuli provided by different histories, heritages and cultures, as reflected in the workshop-based teaching approach used at the School.
As usual, the academic year at the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli begins on the last Monday in September. For several years now, the school has chosen to abandon the traditional lecture hall for its inaugural greeting in favour of artistic venues in the city of Spilimbergo, as a way of introducing students to a local context that not only hosts them but is also the cradle of mosaic art.
Today was an introductory day for getting to know each other, but tomorrow the corridors will once again resound with the sound of hammers and lessons will begin in earnest: a new adventure will begin for students eager to be catapulted into the world of high artistic craftsmanship, in a school which, as President Lovison reiterates, is the only one in the world to train entrepreneurs specialising in the art of mosaic. On the other hand, the teaching programmes have already been prepared and updated to reflect current knowledge and requirements in both the labour market and forms of expression.
Well-known students and new recruits are therefore welcomed into an institution that has been working for over a century in the art of mosaic, training master mosaicists capable of creating, promoting, passing on, preserving and innovating it.As always, the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli will be open to anyone who wants to learn more about what is taught and learned there, those who want to observe a learning method based on direct experience and the importance of unique, unrepeatable, high-quality craftsmanship, those who are curious to understand how teachers and students interact as they develop projects together, and above all, those who want to see how mosaics can be an experience for building relationships and friendships in the name of respect and multiculturalism.
29 september 2025
