Switzerland — Sardinia — beyond

Learning happens by living.

An experiential education project where the world itself becomes the prepared environment — a place for learning, where everyday life becomes the classroom.

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The Philosophy

We believe the world is already a prepared environment — a place set, with care, for a child to learn within it. And that life, lived attentively and within its own rhythms, becomes the truest school.

Casa Viva grows between two homes: Switzerland and Sardinia.

It is rooted in intercultural learning, ancestral knowledge, craftsmanship, and the quiet rhythms of daily life.

We turn curriculum into lived experience, and lived experience into curriculum — an education where encounter, guidance, and practical life shape one another, preparing adolescents to participate consciously in the world they will help create.

We build bridges between generations — between the elders, who hold a living library of memory and craft, and the children and young people who carry it onward into their own time.

Casa Viva is the space between — where perception happens on its own.

The Story

Casa Viva began with my own children, and a simple question.

What if learning didn't have to be separated from living? What if the village, the workshop, the table, the seasons — the world itself — could be the real classroom?

I am a researcher and writer of living ancestral cultures and traditions, and of interactive education.

I began to travel and live intentionally with my children, letting each place teach us in its own way: craftspeople, elders, daily work, the different rhythms of each community. What I saw changed me. The learning was deeper because it was lived, not taught.

With the wisdom we gathered along the way, we brought this into our daily life. And it grows larger when it is shared.

Casa Viva grew from that. It is my way of opening this to other families and schools — not as a programme to consume, but as a way of living and learning together.

— Sue Gomes, founder of Casa Viva

For Families

Living & learning together

Curated journeys and village residencies where daily life becomes your children's education.

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For Schools & Institutions

Designing experiential learning

Programs, immersions and tools shaped together with educators for their own children, adolescents and teachers.

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For Families

Living Guides Experience

Integrative educational journeys lived together with my own children across Switzerland, Europe, and beyond. Each place becomes part of daily life — where travel turns into education, and local traditions into lived knowledge. Every curated destination unfolds as a Living Guide, available in two ways:

  • The Ebook — takes you through the Living Guide Experience on its own, so you can follow the journey at your own pace.
  • Guide & Toolbox — gives you the ebook together with the gathered materials — modules, experience ebooks, templates and a reflection journal — so you can bring the experience home and keep living it.
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Family Immersion

Intergenerational and intercultural residencies lived alongside local families, where daily life itself becomes the curriculum. Families settle into the rhythm of a village — its mornings, its work, its table — and learning arrives through encounter rather than instruction. Held through the turning seasons, around the rhythm of each family.

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For Schools & Institutions

Educational Design Program

The starting point for every educational partnership. Rather than a fixed programme, we design together — listening first to the school, its educators and the children and adolescents themselves, to their needs, their values and their rhythm, and shaping an experiential pathway that belongs to them. The conversation begins here; everything that follows is built from it.

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AdoLab — Youth & School Immersion

AdoLab is an immersive educational programme where adolescents learn through lived experience. Inspired by Montessori principles, integrative education and ancestral knowledge, it accompanies adolescents through real life, meaningful work, and intercultural experience. Built on intergenerational learning, practical life, and real-impact projects — with curriculum-equivalence documentation. For schools whose path ends before adolescence, it also serves as a bridge for students moving on.

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Modules & Toolbox

The gathered materials of the Casa Viva approach — modules, templates, experience guides and reflection journals — shaped for a school's own context. A practical foundation that an institution can carry within its own walls.

  • Contemporary Intelligence Modules — themes that prepare adolescents and support educators for the present world, supporting young people's own creation. The lenses of the Casa Viva approach, revealed within the experience itself.
  • Equivalence Curriculum — maps lived experience onto formal curriculum requirements, so the school can recognise and validate what students learn.
  • Exchange & Formation — brings educators, students and families together through gatherings, training and shared practice, and connects them across experiences in Switzerland, Europe and beyond — so the approach takes root and reaches outward.
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For families & institutions

Membership

A living educational archive and a community of exchange — reflections, journals, modules and experience guides, unfolding gradually between families, adolescents, educators and projects.

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Selected connections

For families, partners, and those who wish to walk alongside us.

For schools, institutions, and professional conversations.

Our visual archive — a quiet collection of the experiences as they unfold — lives on Instagram.