The party reached their destination, the Villa Medici, on 27 January 1858. Built by the Medici family in the 1540s, the Villa occupies a commanding position overlooking the city of Rome, and its statue-studded gardens were already celebrated before the French government took possession of it in 1803. The scholars had well-furnished individual rooms, with a common room, dining room and well-stocked library. They were able to read French newspapers, usually a week late.

The new arrivals were introduced to the Director and to their fellow scholars and subjected to a number of rituals intended to create a bond between old and new inmates. The Director, Schnetz, was now seventy years old, often dressed in classic artist's garb of a huge dressing gown and a Greek cap adorned with gold tassels. Gounod described him as a man of ‘very gentle, warm appearance, despite a thick hedge of black eyebrows connecting to masses of hair almost entirely covering his forehead’. Schnetz adored Italy, a passion planted by a visit in his youth in the company of Géricault and Léopold Robert, and being warmly sociable he was one of the very few Frenchmen in Rome to be accepted by Roman society. His guardianship of his talented charges was benign and tolerant, and his personality drew visitors to the Villa that enriched the sense of its being a highly selective society. On Sundays the Director gave a reception at which music was always a desirable component, putting an obligation on anyone with Bizet's facility at the piano to entertain the company.

There were seventeen young men in place when the party of six new students arrived: Bonnet, Vaudremer, Daumet, Guillaume (architects); Lévy, Giacomotti, Maillot, Clément, Delaunay (painters); Carpeaux, Chapu, Doublemard, Maniglier, Lepère (sculptors); Bellay, Soumy, Dubois, Gaillard (engravers); and Conte (composer). Bizet was much the youngest of the group throughout his stay. See the Record of Inmates of the Villa Medici 1858–1860.