9/17/2023 0 Comments Aim high academy rustic cuff“If you want the highest quality, you stick with Swiss.” “It’s the same as the watch industry,” Neri’s son, who tends to the school’s business matters, has said. Unaccredited, expensive, and, typically, family run, Swiss finishing schools took the place of men’s university education for many wealthy Western European women with matrimonial ambitions. Their advertisements in The Swiss Monthly, a long-vanished periodical dedicated to horoscopes and the autobiographies of amateur alpinists, ran amid ones for “dietetic specialties” and “colonial goods.” Some promised pastoral luxury (“large gardens on lake shore”), others a pedagogical focus on domestic science and modern languages. is located, was at various times home to Charlie Chaplin, Zelda Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, and Vladimir Nabokov it was also a sort of capital for establishments where, as Muriel Spark wrote in her final novel, “The Finishing School,” “parents dump their teenage children after their schooldays and before their universities or their marriages or careers.” In the nineteen-twenties, Lausanne alone boasted forty-five such schools. The prosperous canton of Vaud, where I.V.P. Housed in a traditional chalet, built in 1911 for a Dutch baroness, the institute bills itself as the last finishing school in Switzerland. Their appearance-blow-dried hair, dry-clean-only dresses-suggested an abundance of wealth and time, both of which are de-facto prerequisites of admission at the Institut Villa Pierrefeu, where the summer course lasts six weeks and costs an average of thirty thousand dollars. An e-mail, sent by the school a few weeks prior to their arrival, advised the women to “dress in good taste,” and they had interpreted the cryptic guidance with remarkable consistency. Several women, some as young as eighteen, others in late middle age, could be seen scrambling, chamois-like, up the terraced hillside. “It’s quite lucky.” She smiled and gestured graciously toward Lake Geneva, which, like the sky above it, was an oversaturated blue, as though photographed on expired film. “We haven’t had a summer like this in a hundred years,” she told me. To Viviane Neri, the school’s headmistress, the heat wave engulfing Europe came as a pleasant surprise. M., which is when classes begin at the Institut Villa Pierrefeu. Meanwhile, in Glion, a tiny village roosting high above the city of Montreux and accessible by funicular, it was already above seventy degrees Fahrenheit by 8:30 A. This past summer, as Austrian glaciers melted and Swedish forests burned, the Swiss Air Force, which exists to protect a nation that hasn’t fought a war in five hundred years, was tasked with supplying tens of thousands of gallons of water to herds of parched cows stranded in Alpine pastures.
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