Two seemingly incongruous components have come together about every two years: the serene terraces of the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, and the noisy exuberance of 25 beginning-level graduate students. Add in a small faculty of first-rate professors and a resourceful local support team, and one has the ingredients for the month-long Vatican Observatory Summer Schools. The eighth School takes place in the summer of 2001, and its goals are the same as when the series started in 1986: to encourage and motivate a mix of young people from industrialized and developing countries who are at critical moments of their research careers, and to make a small, but significant contribution to the progress of developing countries by exposing some of their most talented young citizens to people involved in high quality research in astrophysics. This account outlines the nature of the Schools, their follow-up, and something of how the spirit of sharing of personal and institutional resources is achieved.