Using lecturers pre-eminent in their field, and exerting our influence where it counts – to gain out-of-hours visits to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and to the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, for example – our small-group tours of Italy do full justice to an incomparably rich cultural heritage.
We also offer fresh perspectives on old friends, using art historians, not musicologists, on our opera tours of Verona and seeing Florence, Padua and Bologna through the prism of science and medicine as well as art.
We bring you Puccini at the maestro’s lakeside villa, the mosaics of Ravenna and the frozen worlds of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We dine finely in Piedmont, throw light on the Dark Ages in the northern Adriatic and stand at the crossroads of European civilisations in Sicily. We gaze up at Michelangelo’s David and down at Etruscan tombs. We give you Italy, packaged in a gilt-edged portfolio.