World class: At the Rome Center, students become global citizens

One person who had an especially transformative experience at the Rome Center is Christina Mifsud.

In 1991, at age 19, Mifsud, came to Rome from the United States to study abroad for a semester.

John P. Felice, who recognized Mifsud’s last name as Maltese, called her to his office on her first day to connect over their shared heritage. After her first meeting with Felice, Mifsud says her life path was changed. 

“From that moment, on a hot August day, he mentored me through this transformative process,” Mifsud says. 

The classes she took in sites like the Pantheon and the Vatican deepened her appreciation for art. 

“Watching my professor do this every week, I was already thinking about how I could do it as a job,” Mifsud says.

When Mifsud’s semester abroad was complete, Felice encouraged her to apply for an Italian Renaissance art history program in Florence that accepted only seven students per year. She got into the program and moved to Florence, learning Italian and planting roots.

“To be a young woman in her early 20s and living abroad, it was very rare,” Mifsud says. 

Now, Mifsud is an adjunct professor of art history for a new generation of students at the Rome Center. Her experience has inspired her to follow in Felice’s footsteps to provide a life-changing experience for students by immersing them in the history and culture of Italy.

“They’ve signed up for something to put them outside of their comfort zone, and we are their mentors to lead them to those magical places.” 

Felice set a standard of building relationships with students like Mifsud. He had a fatherlike presence with students and a winning sense of humor. Enduring stories include Felice blocking the Italian National Railway with a phone call to a conductor who then halted a train full of students who had skipped classes and were heading to a party in Florence. Within minutes the conductor sent the students back to the Rome Center assuring they were not late for class.

Born in Malta in 1923, Felice served as a translator for the British Armed Forces during World War II. It was there that he met young American soldiers and first observed that the U.S. needed globally trained citizens. 

“His mission in life was creating this [Rome Center],” says Father Michael J. Garanzini, S.J., former Loyola University Chicago president and current president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

In 1959, Felice became a professor of theology at Loyola University Chicago. He led a couple of student trips to Europe, and an idea for an American university campus in Rome began to take form.

He met with the Italian president and the U.S. ambassador to discuss the idea, and in 1962, his vision became a reality with the opening of the Rome Center. In its first year, it served a class of 92 students in a site that was once part of the 1960 Olympic Village.

“In establishing the Rome Center, Loyola sought to mold foreign study with the traditional concept of Jesuit education, providing, thereby, a unique and rich setting in which a group of Americans could properly develop ‘international-mindedness,’” he wrote in a 1965 proposal.

The campus would move twice more to different locations in Rome’s Balduina neighborhood before finding its permanent home in 1979. Felice served in several capacities, from dean of students to director emeritus, until his death in 2008.

In the years immediately following Felice’s death, the Rome Center experienced financial hardship. At this time, Father Garanzini was the director of the Rome Center.

“Father Garanzini really breathed life into the embers that were still burning,” Waller says. “Here we are in 2024 with perhaps the most prestigious, beautiful study-abroad campus in Europe.”

Father Garanzini set into motion a review of the curriculum and its renewed emphasis on immersive, on-site classes. He also worked to increase the academic standing of some of the Rome Center’s professors to emphasize their expertise. The 2009 purchase of its current campus paved the way for updated dorms, a library, and a freestanding chapel.

“What students are interested in changes over time and what they need changes over time,” Father Garanzini says. “But at the same time, they’re all the same as they were 50 years ago.”

Felice’s lasting impact as the Rome Center’s founder is still evident today. He believed that faculty should be educators beyond the classroom. This sense of community is part of what sets the Rome Center apart, Mifsud says, and the low teacher-student ratio balances independence with a sense of familiarity and care.

Felice did not want the Rome Center to have classes on Fridays because he believed students should use their weekends to travel around Europe, a value the center continues to instill. 

Waller says Felice’s legacy lives on in the faculty and staff of the Rome Center, who have a passion for bridging cultures. 

“All these values that [Felice] stood for, combined with the love for students, incredible sense of humor. … Our faculty carry those same values, even if they didn’t know him,”
Waller says.

Looking toward the future, the faculty and staff of the Rome Center want to use its curriculum and geographic position to prepare students to solve global issues.

“In our world, where distances in miles are constantly being bridged by the wonders of communications and transportation, the emphasis must now be on bridging the distances between ideas which can divide people far more impenetrably from each other,” Felice wrote in 1965.

This is the spirit the current faculty and staff of the Rome Center are carrying forward. For example, this fall, students will visit the Amalfi coast to learn about unsustainable tourism.

“The trip looks at our impact as tourists, how tourists can override local culture,” Waller says. it examines how overtourism can damage the environment and economy.”

Though she teaches art history, Mifsud has found ways to engage students in the present. “You may play a role in saving, protecting, and conserving the works we’re looking at,” Mifsud tells her students. 

Today’s students stay at the Rome Center for shorter periods, which allows more students to experience its offerings. Courses have adapted to the times, giving way to a curriculum with a greater emphasis on pressing global issues. The faculty and staff at the Rome Center also hope that more students studying in STEM fields will experience Rome. 

“Contact with great arts, great philosophy, and historical phenomena will make you a better doctor or a better nurse or a better person,” says assistant professor of history Anne Wingenter.

For Father Garanzini, the current vision of the Rome Center is much the same as Felice intended, and it remains a “jewel for the University.”

“The vision is to show [students] that there’s this big world out there and give them a chance to survive it and to master it, and they will become citizens of a much bigger planet,” Father Garanzini says. “And that’s still what happens. They go there and it profoundly changes them.”

Read more stories from the John Felice Rome Center.