And increasingly, you can learn even as a visitor. The school offers corsi brevi – short courses ranging from four-day intensives to week-long programmes – to give travellers a hands-on introduction to the art. Meanwhile, the tours include access to an archive of more than 800 mosaic works and the opportunity to glimpse into the classrooms where students and maestri work side by side. Leading each visit is usually one of the 79 guides that have specifically been trained by the school, or, for a more local flavour, Spilimbergo’s volunteer city guides, who often pair the experience with a stroll through the town.
The experience doesn’t stop at the school gates. Spilimbergo itself is full of mosaics: decorating the interiors of its imposing Roman-Gothic Duomo, embedded in shopfronts, woven into restaurant floors and tucked into hidden corners of the old town. On its main thoroughfare, Corso Roma, mosaic shops and showrooms display beautiful creations from the school’s alumni for purchase; while on the outskirts of town, Fabbrica di Mosaici Mario Donà, a historic family-run kiln that moved from Murano to Spilimbergo in 1991, can be visited by appointment to see where the enamels for the mosaics are made.