Venice Carnival: a teen camp with a mask workshop and a street performance

A city and creative programme rather than a course: no lessons, no classroom. The group is led in French by a qualified director and leaders, and the week is built around one making project - masks and costumes - and one performing project, a street show the participants rehearse and then play in public. Sightseeing and the lagoon islands fill the rest.

The school offers a special discount - ask us for details. The price covers the return flight from Paris, full board, the full leadership team, accommodation, all travel on the ground, every activity named in the programme, repatriation and personal accident cover, and the administrative follow-up before and after the trip. Personal spending, vaccinations and formalities, activities outside the programme, optional cover and the connection from a city other than Paris are not included.

A two-star hotel in the centre of Venice, in the Cannaregio district, about a quarter of an hour on foot from St Mark's Square and a little over a kilometre from Santa Lucia station. The building dates from the fifteenth century; rooms are spacious and furnished in eighteenth-century Venetian style, each with its own bathroom and toilet. A hairdryer is available on request.

Full board, split across the day the way the city works: breakfast in the hotel's own dining room, a picnic at midday while the group is out, and small restaurants in the evening.

Making comes first: each participant builds a mask and a costume in a collective workshop that runs through the stay, and the group rehearses a street performance to play in public. Alongside that are the Doge's Palace, St Mark's Basilica and the Campanile, a treasure hunt and a photo rally through the back lanes, a gondola ride on the canals, and a day out to Murano and Burano for the glass workshops and the painted houses.

The hotel has its own breakfast room and rooms with private bathrooms; it is a small central property rather than a campus. Everything else happens in the city itself, reached on foot and by vaporetto - which in Venice is the public bus.

Venice is 118 islands joined by more than 400 bridges, and the camp is built to be walked and sailed rather than driven. Participants are not spectators at the carnival: they make what they wear and perform what they rehearsed, in the street, in front of whoever is passing. The group is small, one adult to every eight young people, and moves on public transport, so the week feels closer to living in the city than to touring it.