Art & Study Retreats in Italy
Venues: In the Footsteps of Michelangelo
This course/tour will focus on Michelangelo’s works, life, and times, including some of his more famous Renaissance predecessors, such as Masaccio in painting and Donatello in sculpture. What better place to do it than in the area where Michelangelo himself spent so much time.
We will host it at the Pensione Bencistà, in the hills east of Florence. The Bencistà may be the last family-run inn in Florence. It is a Renaissance villa with terraces looking down on the city in the valley below. From here you can see clearly just all of Florence, including the Duomo, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the church of Santa Maria Novella. There are sitting rooms and libraries and long winding halls; it’s an ideal setting for the kind of “art and study retreats” we want to create in Italy.
We’ve been going to the Bencistà with our children for about 15 years now. We often have—literally—a room with a view. Carla and Simone, the friendly owners, and their daughter and son-in-law Beatrice and Daniele, are delighted to host about 20 of us, at mezza pensione, which means breakfast and dinner—or lunch if you want to dine in Florence in the evening. The food is excellent, often Tuscan country cooking.
Afternoons are free for you to explore Florence on you own, or just relax at the Bencistà. The goal of our Art and Study Retreats in Italy is to provide the contemplative leisure people so desperately need today.
The tour begins and ends with a stay at Hotel Ponte Sisto, “our” four-star hotel in Rome. The rooms are beautiful, as is the location in the center of Renaissance and Baroque Rome, on the right bank of the Tiber, next to Ponte Sisto, the most beautiful bridge in Rome.