Students use ‘hands, head, and heart’ to learn dying trades at Vatican art school

Vatican City, Feb 19, 2025 / 11:20 am (CNA).

Recent high school and college graduates are studying some of the world’s historic arts and trades at a new school run by St. Peter’s Basilica. 

The “School of Arts and Crafts” of the Fabbrica di San Pietro — the department that oversees maintenance, restoration, and repairs of the Vatican’s papal basilica — is offering for the third year a free, six-month training course with a concentration in one of five traditional crafts: stone and marble work, bricklaying and plastering, carpentry, blacksmithery, and mosaic design.

“It is important for the basilica to have this school, because it restores a tradition from the 1700s, putting it at the center of [the basilica’s] life today,” the school’s director, Father Francesco Occhetta, SJ, told CNA.

“Which is why,” the priest added, “this alliance of hands, head, and heart, today, has revived something that was dying in the culture over the last 30 years.” 

“The school is first and foremost an experience of relationships for the 20 young men and women living together and learning — in the basilica — about the maintenance of the basilica, through the skills of our craftsmen… We pass on these skills to them, so that the generations, holding hands, pass on that knowledge that can be passed on only from one generation to the next,” Occhetta said.

Working with the hands

For the students, the rare chance to receive a hands-on education in a trade or craft in Rome was a big appeal of the school.

“I’d always been interested in an artistic career, and I had already decided that I did not want to pursue a career that required me to be on the computer all day; I knew I wanted to work with my hands,” 22-year-old Cristina Squatriti told CNA. 

The Italian-American from Ann Arbor, Michigan, joined 19 other students, mostly Italians aged 18–25, to study at the Vatican from November 2024 through April 2025.

Occhetta explained that participants spend 600 hours learning from masters in the trades involved in the regular and extraordinary maintenance of St. Peter’s Basilica — 200 hours in a classroom and 400 hours in a lab.

While Squatriti studied Spanish literature at a university in Michigan, knowing she wanted to have a more physically-engaging career, she joined the stonemasons and marble workers track at the school, which, she said, seemed “too good to be true with both the academic and the practice part of it, and the time spent in laboratory.”

The students live inside the Vatican and attend classes on several core subjects together, including the history of St. Peter’s Basilica, fundamentals of the history of architecture and art techniques, and biblical and theological foundations. They then divide into specialized lessons and time in the laboratories based on the track they are following.

The young men and women also venture outside the city state to learn from some of Rome’s ancient sites and historic churches.

From Gozo, Malta, Francesco Bonello is also following the marble working study course. The 20-year-old already had a background in commercial marble cutting but told CNA he had less experience on the artistic side.

“I worked with my father since I was 13 years old,” Bonello said. “He’s a marmista [marble cutter]. We work industrially in marble, but I always wanted to learn the fundamental techniques of a marmoraro [marble engraver] … [who] works only with chisels and hammers to make beautiful works by hand, which for me is the passion of the work.”

While both Bonello and Squatriti said the experience has been fantastic, they noted it has not been easy to learn the intricate craft of stone incision.

“All of us pretty much had never touched a scalpel in our lives,” Squatriti said, “so we started off with learning how to incise letters, and then we did a whole week of straight lines, which was really tough mentally, but that was how we got our hand to feel comfortable with the tools best.”

Now the students have moved on to a technique called “intarcio,” which is the inlaying of marble inside another piece of marble.

Squatriti said one can see the “intarcio” method throughout the floors of St. Peter’s Basilica: “It’s very slow going, because it’s a tough material to work with, but I’ve learned so much in the past three months.”

Passing on knowledge from the experts

“The students meet the greatest experts of the basilica and learn concretely how to do the maintenance of the marble, of the wood, of the mosaic” inside St. Peter’s Basilica, Occhetta explained.

On the spiritual part of the course, he said, “St. Peter’s is a sacred space, and the goal is for our students to also encounter their own sacred space while doing maintenance. So there is, first of all, a spiritual dimension on which the school is based, there is a community dimension where our students, accompanied by an educator and her collaborators, grow together, and then there is a dimension properly related to learning.”

Both students said attending the school has felt like being part of a big family. 

“I’ve really formed connections that I’m going to carry with me for my career and just the rest of my life in general,” Squatriti said. 

Bonello said he hopes to have a career using his new engraving skills with a chisel, scalpel, and hammer, and continue working in industrial marble cutting.

“The top technology helps you invest more in the company, in your work, helps you do it beautifully,” he said, “but for me it’s important to know the fundamental techniques, because when you master the fundamental techniques, it will help you in the long run for your career.”

Squatriti too hopes to use what she learned in the course for an artistic career in sculpture.

Occhetta said working “with the hands is one of the keys to revitalizing the world of young people in the workplace today as well.” 

The Vatican basilica has already hired two of its former students as part of the “Sanpietrini,” the full-time St. Peter’s maintenance crew, and hopes to also do so in the future, whenever possible.

But the leadership of the school also hopes the education it is providing in traditional arts and craftmanship will be of benefit not only to St. Peter’s Basilica but also to historic churches around the world.

“These young people can have this opportunity and then go to other basilicas around the world to be able to pass on what is the knowledge of the Fabbrica di San Pietro,” which has a 500-year history, Occhetta said.

Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/262297/students-use-hands-head-and-heart-to-learn-dying-trades-at-vatican-art-school