Eight from Franklin
The job they were given is the one everybody underestimates: being the first person a collector meets.
On the Saturday of a concours, the work is invisible. That is the whole point of it. Cars stand in five squares, the crowd walks between them, the judges take their time, and everything appears to have arranged itself.
Eight students from Franklin University Switzerland spent Lugano Elegance 2026 making sure it looked that way. Several of them were working on the event before it opened and stayed on after it closed, on the preparation and the clearing up that no visitor sees.
Franklin sits on a hillside above Lugano, in Sorengo, about fifteen minutes from the squares where the concours is held. It was founded in 1969 to bring an American liberal arts education to Europe, and it remains the only liberal arts university in the world accredited both in the United States, through the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, and in Switzerland as a university institute. Its curriculum is built around Academic Travel, which means its students are used to being taken out of a classroom and made to learn something in the place where it happens.
That habit turns out to be good preparation for an event.
A concours is an unusual thing for a student to work on because it cannot be moved. A term paper can be handed in late. A transporter arrives at the hour it arrives, with a car on it worth more than most of the building it is parked next to, and either someone knows where that car is going or nobody does. The registration list is right or it is wrong, and it becomes wrong in public. Everything is finite: the number of parking spaces in Piazza Riforma, the number of hours the road closure lasts, the number of minutes before the judges start.
There is a version of student involvement in events that amounts to handing out lanyards. This was not that. The eight worked across the operation, from the preparation weeks before through the three days themselves, in a small organisation where there is nowhere for a spare person to stand.
Two of them carried on afterwards. One went on to work on the 1000 Miglia Warm Up CH, the Swiss event Scuderia Classiche runs over the roads of Ticino ahead of the Italian race. One went on to the 1000 Miglia itself, in Brescia.
That last step is not a small one. The 1000 Miglia is a national event in Italy with a hundred year history behind it, several hundred cars, and an operation that runs across four days and half a country. It is not a place where anyone is carried.
The Brescia start line is a little over two hours from the Franklin campus by road. In most careers it is a very much longer journey than that, and it usually starts later.