About

Living Latin in Rome High School is a two-week residential Latin immersion program set in Rome, Italy, open to high school students who have completed the equivalent of one year of college or two years of high school Latin. Run by the Paideia Institute — a nonprofit dedicated to classical education — it operates July 2–16, 2026, with students housed in a residential facility in Rome where Paideia instructors also live, serving as dorm supervisors and maintaining a structured, immersive environment throughout the program. The cost is $5,500, covering tuition, housing, meals, all site visits and museum admissions, and airport transfers; airfare is not included. Full and partial need-based scholarships are available, with priority consideration given to applications received by March 1.

The program's premise is pedagogically distinctive: Latin is treated as a living language rather than a grammatical exercise to be translated. Drawing on second-language acquisition research, the curriculum integrates oral production — speaking, listening, writing — with reading instruction, on the theory that active use of a language deepens reading ability and vocabulary in ways that translation-only instruction cannot achieve. By the end of the two weeks, class sessions are conducted entirely in Latin. The classroom is split between an air-conditioned room at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, located five minutes from the student residence, and the city of Rome itself. Students read passages from Latin literature connected to specific ancient sites, then visit those sites and interact with the texts — and with each other — in Latin in the places the authors described. Grammar and syntax are reinforced in context rather than in isolation.

The 2026 program theme is Ovid and the Poetics of Play. Students read broadly across the Ovidian corpus — the Metamorphoses, Amores, Ars Amatoria, Heroides, Fasti, and exile poetry — and explore the post-Ovidian reception tradition in medieval and Renaissance literature during the program's second week. A full-day trip to Sulmona, Ovid's birthplace in the Apennine mountains, is included. The head teacher is Laurie Glenn Hutcheson, who completed her PhD at Boston University in 2018, taught Latin and Greek at Boston University Academy for eight years, and has led the program since 2014. The full teaching staff includes PhD candidates and classicists from American and European institutions, all living on-site with students.

No experience speaking Latin is required for admission — only reading ability. The application requires a completed form and a teacher recommendation, due by March 1 for priority consideration; applications after that date are reviewed on a rolling basis while space permits. The program does not publish cohort size or acceptance rates. A chaperoned group flight from JFK to Rome is available for students who prefer not to travel independently; Paideia staff meet all students at Rome's Fiumicino airport on arrival day.

For a student serious about Latin, classics, or ancient history, Living Latin in Rome is a program with no real equivalent in the pre-college landscape. The combination of rigorous linguistic instruction, immersive oral production, and daily engagement with primary texts in the physical spaces they describe is something that cannot be replicated in a classroom. The Paideia Institute has been running this program since 2014; its alumni consistently describe the experience as having reoriented their relationship to Latin as a language rather than an academic subject. For students who already study Latin and want to go deeper than any domestic program allows, this program is ideal.