Villa St. Jean International School

Among prominent alumni living today are Juan Carlos I, the recently abdicated King of Spain, the famed soccer coach Anson Dorrance, chocolate entrepreneur, Michael Litton,[3] Turkish historian Selim Deringil,[4] and Indonesian photographer Rio Helmi.

Fr Kieffer built his school on a secluded clifftop bluff, surrounded on three sides by the sinuous Saane/Sarine River, and bordered on the fourth by the quiet neighborhoods abutting the Boulevard de Pérolles, a main thoroughfare leading out of the medieval Swiss burg of Fribourg, considered one of the most beautiful cities in the country.

Ms Schiff's evocation of the self-contained, red-roofed village is quite accurate, but the campus did not overlook the city so much as it was perched on a flat, wooded plateau, nestled in an elbow high above the Sarine River, which over the eons had carved the bluff's curling cliffs.

It is commonly accepted, although not definitively proven, that Benito Mussolini, who spent a period during his youth as a construction worker living and working in Switzerland, contributed to the building of the Gallia.

Villa St Jean, under the guidance of the Marianist brothers and priests who founded and administered it, was remarkable among elite Swiss boarding schools for its ability to reinvent itself as required by changing times.

–Saint Exupéry During its incarnation as an international school, although nominally a Catholic institution, the Marianists administering Villa St Jean hired lay faculty and staff without reference to religious affiliation, and admitted students on the same basis.

The students, as noted above a diverse mix of nationalities and character, lived in three main dormitory buildings, Ormes, Sapinière and Bossuet and attended classes in the aforementioned Gallia Hall.