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Caravaggio's 'The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist', in St. John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta © Sam Walker
Palazzo Pisani, Venice © Sam Walker
Palazzo Pisani, Venice © Sam Walker© Sam Walker
Privileged Access: Private & After-Hours Visits
Our small-group tours and cruises offer privileged access to extraordinary locations across Europe and beyond. Several tours feature private after-hours visits to world-renowned sites – from exclusive evening access to St Mark's Basilica in Venice to private viewings at the MoMA in New York City, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and the Palatine Chapel in Palermo. Whether travelling solo or with companions, our experts lecturers and careful planning opens otherwise closed doors.
Privileged Access: a selection
Private & After-Hours Visits with Martin Randall Travel
There you are, in a place that resonates with meaning – without the distraction of hundreds of other people, none of whom seem as captivated or inquisitive as you. Not only do you get the benefit of your guide’s expert commentary, there’s also time and space to soak up the sense of a place - and unleash your historical imagination.
So it’s no surprise that we have made such privileged access a key element of many of our exclusive tours. Great art and architectural marvels take centre stage throughout: private visits to the Sistine chapel on our ‘Essential Rome’ and ‘Connoisseur’s Rome’ tours showcase Michelangelo’s ceiling fresco and Raphael’s frescoes away from the crowds. In Venice, the splendour of Basilica di S. Marco’s Byzantine mosaics and sculpture are studied in private tranquility on ‘Art History of Venice’. In Florence, we gain entry to magnificent palazzi, otherwise bolted shut for other groups.
Private art and gallery tours offer opportunity to interpret the world’s most important works in contemplative tranquility. Out-of-hours access to Madrid’s Prado an hour before the museum opens to the public, means a vast collection including masterpieces by Goya, Velázquez, Rubens, Titian, Bosch and El Greco can be absorbed in full. On our connoisseur’s tour of New York, we enter the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) after-hours, allowing art historian Gijs van Hensbergen to bring one of the greatest collections of 20th-century art in the world to life.
On a Martin Randall tour, everything is organised and included in the price: entrance fees, special access permits, evening openings, private concerts in historic venues. Our experienced tour managers handle all logistics and entry arrangements.
Meet some of the experts taking you behind closed doors
Mr Gijs van Hensbergen
Art historian and author specialising in Spain and the USA. His books include The Sagrada Familia (2017), Gaudí, In the Kitchens of Castile and Guernica and he has published in the Burlington Magazine and Wall Street Journal. He read languages at Utrecht University and Art History at the Courtauld, and undertook postgraduate studies in American art of the 1960s. He has worked in England, the USA and Spain as exhibitions organiser, TV researcher and critic and is a Fellow of the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies at the LSE. Twitter: @GvanHensbergen | Website: gijsvanhensbergen.com
Dr Susan Steer
Art historian specialising in Venice. Her MA concentrated on the city’s art and architecture and her PhD on Venetian Renaissance altarpieces. As post-doctoral researcher with the University of Glasgow and Neil MacGregor scholar at the National Gallery, she worked as a researcher and editor on the National Inventory of European Painting, the UK’s online catalogue of European paintings. She has extensive experience of teaching History of Art for university programmes in the UK and Italy. Susan taught for the University of Warwick in Venice and is now the Venice representative for the British charity, the Venice in Peril Fund.
Professor Harry Charrington
Architect and Professor of Architecture at the University of Westminster. He read Architecture at Cambridge, where he was the founding editor of Scroope: Cambridge Architectural Journal, and subsequently combined academia and practice in both England and Finland. He has a particular interest in the history of modernism and obtained his PhD from the LSE on Alvar Aalto. His books include the award-winning Alvar Aalto: the Mark of the Hand and contributions to Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World (Yale University Press).
Dr Michael Douglas-Scott
Dr Michael Douglas-Scott mixes scholarship with accessible discourse, with reasoned opinion, and is highly sought-after as an art history lecturer. He has lectured for New York University (London campus) and Birkbeck College, University of London, specialising primarily in 16th-century Italian art and architecture. He studied at the Courtauld and Birkbeck College and lived in Rome for several years. He has written articles for Arte Veneta, Burlington Magazine and the Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes.
Mr Gavin Plumley
Writer, broadcaster, lecturer and the author of two books. He studied music at Keble College, Oxford and specialises in the culture of Central Europe during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As well as writing for newspapers, magazines and opera and concert programmes worldwide, Gavin has lectured at the British Museum, the National Gallery, the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House and Wigmore Hall. Twitter: @gavinplumley | Instagram: @gavinplumley | Website: gavinplumley.com





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Why travel with us?
Leading expertise
Since 1988 we have been the most influential organisation in the field of cultural travel. Our expert speakers are a key ingredient in our tours. Academics, curators and researchers, they are selected not only for their knowledge but also for their ability to communicate clearly and engagingly to a lay audience.
Privileged access
Special arrangements are a feature of our tours – for admission to places not generally open to travellers, for access outside public hours, for private concerts and extraordinary events. In innumerable ways, we lift our clients’ experience far above standards which are regarded as normal for tourists.
Small groups
Most of our tours run with between 10 and 24 participants. Our travellers are self-selected by common interests and an endorsement of our ethos, and you are highly likely to find yourself among link-minded companions.
Value for money
The price includes nearly everything, not only the major ingredients such as hotel, the costs of the lecturer and manager but also tips and drinks with meals. You can secure your booking today with a 15% deposit. We provide full financial protection for our package holidays.
Joining a Martin Randall Cultural Tour
Between 10–22 participants can usually join our small group tours, though the upper limit can be lower dependent on the tour.
Solo travellers are certainly welcome on all small group tours and often make up a majority of our participants. Our experienced tour managers will make sure everyone is properly introduced. There’s a lot to share, and conversation comes naturally as a result.
Read more about solo travel with Martin Randall Travel.
All of our tours are led by experts in the field, including historians, archaologists and journalists.
In the traveller’s perfect world, everyone would be charged the same amount for their room, whether they were alone or sharing with a partner. In the hotelier’s perfect world, all rooms would cost the same, whether they had one, two, three or ten people sleeping there. The world we live in is closer to the hotelier’s vision, where rooms cost the same regardless of occupancy. Two people can split the cost of a £100 room, paying £50 each, or one person can pay the full £100. When expressed as a per person cost, this looks like a £50 supplement.
We negotiate hard with hotels, to keep single-occupancy prices as low as possible, but as long as hoteliers charge per room and not per person, this iniquitous situation will endure. The only obvious alternative – having couples subsidise solo travellers – strikes us as even more unfair.
Martin Randall Travel makes no profit from the single supplement.
A confirmation e-mail is sent as soon as possible (it will take longer if you book over the weekend and/or have selected to receive documentation by post).
Your final balance is due eight weeks before the tour departs. A reminder is sent a few weeks in advance of this, along with an itinerary for the first day of the tour.
Final Documents are sent two to three weeks before the tour departs – the full itinerary, a participant list and any background notes. These will be posted to you (unless you have informed us otherwise); if you live outside the UK, they will be given to you on the first day of the tour.
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