Each CCI semester features two major overnight trips. First is Florence, the greatest Renaissance museum and art city of Italy, with its unique towers and bridges, the beautiful River Arno, museums and palaces such as the Bargelo, Accademia, the Baptistry, Pitti and Uffizi and their unequalled collections of Bernini, Botticelli, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael and uncountably more. This visit opens minds to the fascinating southern-Italy history of conquest, exploitation and revolution, unending through the many ages of taxing rule by Greeks, Romans, Normans, Arabs, Angevins, Bourbons, Garibaldini, Fascists, and Christian Democrats. Venice is another mandatory CCI visit. Here a dozen primitive communes clustered on mudbanks of a swampy north-Italy lagoon became the unique city which is an incredible web of a myriad narrow pedestrian streets, beautifully bridged narrow canals, and one Grand Canal.
All traffic is solely by gondola, boat, or barge.
Through five centuries to 1508, Venetians made their city a dominant imperial European trading and seafaring Republic of huge wealth and power whose remains are visible throughout the city in exquisite and lavish public squares, monuments, palaces and churches.