Locals walk along the streets of Rome and from the Santa Maria Sopra Minerva church, the echoing sound of the full Magnificat by Vivaldi resonates off the ancient architecture.

March 10-17, 101 BVNW choir students traveled to Italy to take part in two concerts, the first in Rome March 12, and the second in Florence March 15.

Senior chorale singer Nick Mauer said the choir was invited to Italy for the American Music Festival. Choral Director Kevin Coker announced the choir would be taking the opportunity to go on this trip to Italy at the 2015 Winter Concert.

“We got invited to go over there by this group and we would get to go into various churches and sing there,” Mauer said. “That’s very cool because…those churches were actually built for that type of music, to have those sounds resonate better, longer, that type of stuff.”

Coker said this was the first time the choir department had offered a trip for all grades, and he said the experience was unique because of it.

“We’ve always just taken choral, and choraleers, and chamber singers somewhere and gone to a destination and…logistically it is much more difficult, but the response [the students] gave me afterwards was really pretty impressive.”

The group landed in Rome midday on March 11. The group spent the first day in Rome touring and sightseeing, Mauer said.

“Ancient Rome was the best for me,” Mauer said. “The Colosseum was incredible, the Roman Forum made me want to monoloque William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.”

Mauer said March 12 was also a lot of touring, until that evening when the choir hosted a concert at the Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. Senior Demetra Arvanitakis said singing in the church was different from singing in the auditoriums at school because the space was so much bigger.

“Because [the church] was so big, the echo was five complete seconds off and I’ve never experienced anything like this before,” Arvanitakis said. “We couldn’t sing compared to what we were hearing because then we would be off tempo, we had to watch [Coker’s] hands or you would be too slow. There were 100 of us in a room and I’ve never heard that kind of echo before.”

Coker also said the atmosphere the choir performed in was much different to what they were used to singing in BVNW, where sound boards in the PAC tend to suck up noise instead of resonating.

“We performed in one of the major basilicas in Rome, it’s historically significant to the church, a huge, huge space with lots of hard surface that had probably a two or three second echo after you let go of the cord so that was on experience,” Coker said. “It was just really neat that this was the original place where this piece was performed and designed.”

Junior Arliegh Blakeney said one of the challenges of singing in such a bigger space was the memorization of the music and the pressure.

“It is still an honor to be able to sing the way we do,” Blakeney said. “There were people just coming in and out, and it’s a lot of pressure to be singing in a big, awesome space like we did. We also got professional recordings, which also put a lot of pressure on us.”

The choir held their second concert at Chiesa San Filippo Neri in Florence March 15. Mauer said the concert in Florence was not as enjoyable as the concert in Rome, but the choir still did well.

“The first church that we had a concert at was more of a Renaissance church, this one was more of a baroque style church that we sang at Tuesday night,” Mauer said. “One of the coolest things was they left the church doors open and so at random times, people walking out on the Florence streets would stop and just walk in.”

Arvanitakis said the trip was mainly for the students to experience the culture of Italy. Mauer said the touring the choir did most of the trip was beautiful.

“It was a great experience,” Mauer said. “I am so blessed the choir got to do it and that I got to be here for it.”