In conversation with the long history of those who came to Italy to learn, to make, and to be changed by place
Nothing begins entirely new. Every act of learning is shaped by what has come before—by traditions carried forward, questioned, and reimagined. FSFA was founded in awareness of this lineage, and in conversation with the long history of artists and thinkers who have come to Italy to study, to work, and to be changed by place.
Florence has hosted many forms of education: study-abroad programs, faculty-led initiatives, temporary schools nested within larger institutions. These efforts have value. Yet we felt there was room for something else—something slower, more rooted, and more deliberately shaped by those who live the practice of making and thinking every day.
FSFA was founded by artists, in dialogue with scholars of Italian culture, to create a school that is not an extension of another institution, but a place in its own right. A place where studio practice exists alongside the study of language, history, philosophy, and daily life; where art is not separated from culture, and culture is not treated as context alone.
In Florence, learning cannot be abstract. The city insists on attention—to materials worn by time, to language spoken and overheard, to the weight of history and the vitality of the present. At FSFA, the city is not a backdrop but a collaborator. Streets, studios, archives, kitchens, and classrooms all become sites of study.
We believe education is most meaningful when it is sustained, intentional, and deeply situated. FSFA exists to support artists and thinkers who want to engage fully—with making, with ideas, and with Italy as a living culture rather than an image or an experience to be consumed. What we have built stands in conversation with what came before, but it is guided by a simple conviction: that learning rooted in place, practice, and community has the power to endure.
Charles came to Florence as a student, fell into the city, and never left. Over the years that followed he became a university professor, brought his own American students to Florence, and watched what the city did to them — understanding, from both sides of that experience, what a school here could and should be.
Twenty-two years ago he co-founded FSFA. Not a program designed in an office and dropped into Florence, but a school built from the inside, by someone who had already spent years living, teaching, and working within the city. He has taught photography, video, web design at FSFA since the school's founding and serves as Dean of Creative Practice.
Among his students over the years: Kevin Systrom, who took a photography course at FSFA during his semester abroad through Stanford — an experience that influenced the founding aesthetic of Instagram.
Melania is Florentine. Florence is not a place she chose, adopted, or stayed in — it is simply where she is from. She trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, one of the oldest and most prestigious fine arts academies in the world, founded in 1563, and continues to teach there today.
Its artistic tradition, its institutions, its ways of seeing are not acquired knowledge for her. They are a native inheritance. She has also taught American art students in the United States — giving her a rare and precise understanding of both the world her students are entering and the world they are coming from.
For Melania, Florence was never a destination. It is simply where the work has always happened — and where she has spent two decades opening that world to students from everywhere else.