Playing soccer with an Italian semi-professional team, pruning grape vines, eating lunch in a castle – these are just a few of the adventures experienced by the group of Guilford College students who took part in the Guilford in Brunnenburg program in the spring of 2022. After a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students and faculty were excited to be able to renew the ties with the program.
Brunnenburg Castle, located in the Provence of South Tyrol, Italy, was one of the places where poet Ezra Pound lived and wrote. Today his daughter and grandson, Mary and Siegfried deRachewiltz, and their family, live there and oversee the estate and its two museums, the Ezra Pound museum and an agricultural museum. The family also works with Guilford College and a few other schools in the United States to host students for study abroad programs. Students on the program live in a farmhouse on the property, eat meals in the castle, take classes together, work together on the farm, travel and get a chance to interact with the people of the village.
Hands-On Learning
During the spring semester at Brunnenburg students take a course load that includes studies of environmental ethics and agro-archaeology, as well as a practicum on sustainable agriculture. Professor Natalya Shelkova led the group in 2022, and designed a course specifically for the program on the economics and politics of European agriculture. “We were learning about the cooperative system of agriculture practiced in this region, and while there, students were able to visit an apple processing facility,” Natalya says. “It was great to have the opportunity to see first hand the facility where farmers have access to some very sophisticated equipment to sort the apples and experience the cooperative system at work.”
Students also work alongside of the crew on the estate, which includes a vineyard and apple orchard. “The opportunity to live and work on a sustainable farm in the Alps appealed to me for a variety of reasons,” says Roman Robinson ’24. “I’m an environmental studies major so the coursework offered on the program complemented my major, but also I plan to work in sustainability and renewable resources after college, and I knew this would be a great experience to see those practices in action.”
Experiential Adventures
As with any study abroad program, the benefits for students include much more than the classwork and assignments. “Students are provided lunch daily at the farmhouse, but they are responsible for their own meals other times of the day,” Natalya says. “They have to learn how to live in the community, shop for food, and cook their own dinners. There are many aspects that can be a challenge, from communicating with people who speak a different language to learning to plan for things like grocery stores being closed on Sundays.”
Roman learned quickly that communication consists of much more than just speech. “We were in a region where people speak primarily German, but there were also Italian speakers. You’d have to switch between trying to understand German and Italian, and I learned that reading people’s gestures and understanding mannerisms is an important key to communicating,” Roman says.
Roman and a few other students on the program also play for Guilford College’s soccer team, and while in Brunnenburg they were able to play on the village’s semi-professional soccer team. “Hearing them speak all around us at practice was a really good way to pick up the language,” Roman says. “Especially when we were talking about soccer, it was easier for me to learn what words would fit in a sentence.”
While in Brunnenburg the students also get the opportunity to travel every other weekend. “We got Euro rail passes for the students and went to Munich, Venice, Florence, and Milan,” Natalya says. “It gives them the opportunity to learn how to travel and get around in new cities, without having the stress of planning and doing it all on their own.”
The Brunnenburg study abroad program is just one of many opportunities available for students at Guilford College. In the spring of 2024 the college planned around eight different opportunities with a variety of different course work, including an Honors course on pilgrimage travel that includes a walk of a stretch of the Camino de Santiago, a trip to India to study gender and social entrepreneurship, and a course on Mexican childhoods and learning traditions in Oaxaca, Mexico.
“Participating in a study abroad program was important to me because it forced me to learn in new ways,” Roman says. “It gives you a lot of people skills and opens you up to experiencing different cultures and identities, all of which are important for developing you as a human.”