When you touch the sky thanks to your GEMBA

The Rotman-SDA Bocconi Global Executive MBA has added the 8th city to its global learning experience. After Milan, Toronto, Mumbai, Shanghai, Copenhagen, San Francisco and São Paulo, Rome comes into the tour. SDA Bocconi campus in Milan and in Rome welcomed the GEMBA class of 2025 for their Module 2, after the start of the program in Toronto (Sept 29, 2023). Besides the double SDA Bocconi campus experience, two signature site visits characterized the module. When in Milan, the class visited Maserati Headquarters in Modena, and when in Rome the GEMBA class followed the old saying: “When you are in Rome, do as the Romans do”. To make the experience unforgettable the most appropriate choice was to visit the Vatican Museum, currently the second largest museum in the world for number of visitors with an average daily rate of 35 thousands.

Maserati Headquarters in Modena

The Vatican Museum hosted the GEMBA class for a private visit that started at 6 am: being the first to enter the site, the GEMBA class, with the guidance of Mr Gianni Crea, the Vatican “Clavigero” (key holder) and his staff, actively participated in the opening of all the doors and gates of the various rooms until the visit ended in the Sistine Chapel marvelously frescoed by Michelangelo Buonarroti and world renowned as the place that hosts the Cardinals for the “Conclave”.

The visit ended with a private conversation with the Museum’s senior management team in the conference room: participants had the opportunity to understand the management challenges in governing security, handling maintenance of extremely precious art crafts, welcoming big crowds every day, and still make the Museum and the Sistine Chapel accessible for everyone. All current challenges will be soon multiplied by the expected major increase in visitors for the 2025 Jubilee year.

Vatican Museum

The visit was guided by Prof. Andrea Rurale, SDA Bocconi Academic Director of the MAMA program: “One of the most important key learning is to understand, by experiencing, what it takes to generate value from unprecedented museums collections like the Vatican’s, an apparently easy task, but much more complicated in real life”, and by Prof. Ferdinando Pennarola, SDA Bocconi GEMBA Academic Co-Director: “GEMBA learning style is to make every moment unique and worth the travel: the private early morning visit to the Vatican Museum was designed to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”. Quotes from the GEMBA 2025 class say that this was an “unforgettable day”, “an early morning challenge but superiorly worth the effort”, “a day when we really touched the sky with our finger”, “a unique visit that makes you speechless”, “a day when you understand the centrality of Rome in the arts and culture global market space

Vatican Museum

SDA Bocconi School of Management