The gap-year tour offering the keys to Venice’s cultural riches

For someone of my generation, the months between school and university were mainly to be spent bumming around Asia with a backpack and a Lonely Planet guide, kipping down in fleapit hostels and phoning home when the money ran out. Even today, most gap-year wishlists tend to involve cheap adventures in far-flung destinations.

For those with the means, there is, however, a rather more highbrow alternative. Every year for the past six decades a group of young people, many of them scions of well-to-do British families, have chosen to spend part of their gap year soaking up the aesthetic glories of Italy courtesy of the John Hall Venice course. Founded in 1965 by John Hall, then an English teacher at King’s School Canterbury, and now run by his son Charlie, the course is described on its website as “a huge cultural mind-opener”.

In terms of depth and breadth, John Hall Venice certainly puts most other cultural tours in the shade. The itinerary, which costs £14,560, begins with an induction week in London (normally at the end of January) when the year’s intake of 30-40 students are primed for the feast awaiting them with general introductions to art appreciation and history. The group then decamps to Venice, its home base for the next five weeks, from where excursions leave for Ravenna, Rome, Florence, and Siena. 

Exclusive visits are laid on to galleries and museums, chapels and cathedrals; optional classes are offered in life drawing, cookery, and spoken Italian. But the meat of the programme is its lecture series, given by a distinguished roster of scholars and experts and covering an enormous swath of cultural ground, from art and architecture to history, philosophy, music, photography and cinema, climate science and astrophysics. 

I catch up with the students towards the end of their London week. By a happy coincidence the first lecture I attend, in a grand room at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that overlooks St James’s Park, is on the subject of the Grand Tour of the 18th and 19th centuries, when exposure to the landscapes and cultures of southern Europe was part of a genteel English education. As described by Jeremy Howard, lecturer in history of art at the University of Buckingham, the parallels are so obvious there’s barely room for irony. The earlier Grand Tourists were travelling, Howard tells us, in order to “have a good time at daddy’s expense before settling down to run their estates and join the governing classes. John Hall Venice is almost like a 21st-century version — except you don’t tend to come home with a Canaletto.”

The deeper you dig in English society the more widely it seems to be known. Among the 2,500 or so alumni are great-and-good figures in the UK arts sector

The course is little publicised, yet the deeper you dig within a certain stratum of English society, the more widely it seems to be known. Among the 2,500 or so alumni are great-and-good figures in the UK arts sector such as singer Emma Kirkby, conductor Jane Glover, Tate Modern curator Matthew Gale and former National Gallery director Sir Nicholas Penny.

Later that day, a reunion cocktail party at The Travellers Club on Pall Mall is a chance to meet students past and present, including a group of four alumni who were on John Hall’s very first outing in 1965 and have remained friends. One of them, retired High Court judge Sir Michael Burton, was the first of three generations to “do the course”, followed by his four daughters and his grandson Carmi, who is one of the 2025 intake. Sally Cockburn, a friend of Burton’s, tells me she saw an advert for the 1965 course on her school noticeboard. “I was 18 at the time, and it was a complete ‘wow’. My life was changed by it,” she says. 

Next day, I accompany the group as it heads for Venice, arriving in the late afternoon. I half-expect the city to be swaddled in fog and a vague sense of unease. Instead what greets us are sparkling, cloudless, tranquil winter days. At this time of year, Venice is as near tourist-free as it can ever be in the 21st century. Gondolas, tied up in rows for the winter, slip-slop gently in the greenish-blue water. Locals sip their Aperol spritz at open-air terraces, apparently enjoying this brief respite from the tourist hordes.

Together with the students, who share rooms between two or three, I’m lodged in a small hotel, a family-run three-star beside the canal in a quiet part of Dorsoduro. Lectures are held 10 minutes away at the Istituto Canossiano, with classrooms off a central patio. I watch the John Hall students stream into the lecture room, mostly English (though there’s a couple of Dutch, two Canadians, and an American) and with just seven boys to 23 girls. Some of them have notebooks, though there’s no homework required and no exams: essentially the course is about the pleasure of learning for its own sake.

“Who has heard of Byzantium?” asks Rebecca Darley, associate professor of history at Leeds University, beginning her talk on the mosaics of Ravenna (which the students will be seeing for themselves next week). Nearly all the hands go up. The tone of Darley’s lecture is entertaining, yet there’s no hint of condescension or dumbing down. Next up is art historian and author Nigel McGilchrist, who speaks to us engagingly about sensuality in Renaissance marble sculpture. “Just look at this David by Bernini: this is so dynamic, it’s clearly someone living. Bernini really pushes the material to the limit,” he says. 

“That was incredible,” mutters one boy to his mates as they head out of the lecture room to grab a slice of pizza on Campo Santa Margherita. 

That evening I sit with the professori at a table in the Osteria Do Torri, where dinner is taken every night at 7.30 prompt. Do the students know each other previously, I wonder aloud? “Some of them do, from dinner parties and point-to-points. They are all of them swimming in the same pool socially,” replies Charlie Hall, an avuncular figure in a three-piece suit who took over when his father retired to a farmhouse in central Italy. Over ricotta-stuffed tortellini and roast porchetta, Hall regales us with anecdotes — like the one about the girl who, in 1987, was temporarily stranded in her nightie in a decoupled train somewhere between France and Italy, and another who plunged into a fountain and was briefly arrested.

Next morning Gregory Dowling, a University of Venice lecturer and resident in the city for 44 years, leads the group on a walkabout. He points out the gloomy canal-side alley where Donald Sutherland encounters the red-coated dwarf in Don’t Look Now — a film which, it transpires, none of the students has seen. “Now I’d like you to prepare yourselves for one of the great spectacles of Europe,” he announces as we round the corner of Calle larga de l’Ascension on to St Mark’s Square.

“It’s the light, the colours . . . and not having any traffic,” enthuses Thea Eadie, formerly of Bradfield School, soon to be studying history of art at Durham. “I’m learning all the Italian rules,” she tells me, “like how to say ‘bruschetta’ properly and never ordering a cappuccino after midday.”  

Their parents might be paying, but most of these young people are serious about wanting the John Hall course to lead to something in later life, even if it’s only a heightened awareness of the great European cultural tradition. 

Alexander Dunluce, an old Etonian, is gazing across the lagoon towards San Giorgio Maggiore in the dazzling winter light. “I thought it might be a good idea to get ‘cultured up’, and now I have the feeling I’ll be a different person when this is over,” he smiles.

That night we return to St Mark’s for a visit that’s impressive even by the course’s standards: there’ll be no one else in the basilica but ourselves. The lights are switched on to full power and suddenly we are staring at 8,000 sq metres of medieval mosaics, glittering with gold and lapis lazuli. As if this weren’t aesthetically thrilling enough, the English counter-tenor Patrick Craig then sings an aria from a Handel oratorio, his powerful voice echoing among the domes and columns. “I’ve already decided I’m getting married in here,” one girl whispers to her neighbour.

Later, in the cold clear night I make my way back to the hotel. As I cross Campo Santa Margherita, there are the students, waving at me from behind the window of the Orange bar where a karaoke session is in full swing. From the summits of western culture to a rave-up in a student bar — they are having, quite literally, the time of their lives. 

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