Two Hidden Restaurants, Tuscany

After our last research trip to Italy, I wrote a post entitled, “Wonderful Discoveries and Dismal Disappointments.”  Not so this time—it was all good!

We planned this trip as a working vacation with concentration on three of our favorite spots in Italy. We stayed in each for five days, determined to stay long enough to unpack, settle in, and catch the spirit of the place, which is just what we did.
With five days on the edge of Lake Como, five more at Castello di Proceno in southern-most Tuscany, and five more in our favorite, Rome, we had a wonderful and relaxing time as we explored historic villas and their gardens, rediscovered beautiful hill towns, and visited favorite places that still  move us. We ate in dozens of delicious restaurants, and had tours of some of the most beautiful, historic, and hidden hotels ever.
Before I go any further, I must thank our researcher, Maggie McKenny-Harris, for the list of hotels and restaurants that she painstakingly compiled after, what must ave been, hours and hours of research and interviews. After trying just two of her suggestions, I knew that I was armed with something very, very valuable indeed. Maggie had us in places I would never have found on my own—quaint, characteristic, historic, family-owned, and always, always lovely. Our guests will be so very thrilled with the amazing hotels and incredible restaurants that have now been added to the AHA list. After a little bounce on the beds, I touch the sheets and pillows, I am all over the bathrooms, into the breakfast rooms, and up on the rooftops. After each new find, we toasted Maggie, and I can’t wait to return to these places myself.  Thank you, Maggie, for finding these beautiful little boutique, out-of-the-way spots that our guests will love.
I will post again soon on our lazy time on the edge of Lago di Como, and, for those who will travel there with us, what you have to look forward to. I will follow with a post on Tuscany, our castle, and the upcoming Music Festival trip July 12 – 18, 2012, and the Tuscany Rome trip September 30-October 8, 2012, and finish the series with a post on what is in store for our travelers to Rome, both in September and Rome, October 10-17, 2012.

If you are curious as to what we found by following the primitive signs in the photo above, it was no big deal, just lunch in an Etruscan cave, circa 700 BC! Everything tastes better in a place like this, and welcome to cultural immersion. Thank you, Maggie!

Until we are there again, it is nice to be home, but I can still feel those warm cobblestones under my feet.
Cynthia

Lunch in an Etruscan cave, circa 700 BC

Beautiful Nurnburg, Germany

OCTOBER 1-8, 2012 ~ 8 DAYS ~ GROUP SIZE: 6-8

PRICE: $3,300.00

CASTLES, CATHEDRALS AND A CONCENTRATION CAMP

On this trip, we will stop at various points along the fabled Romantic Road of Germany.  We will begin at the northern end of the road, in the medieval city of Wurzburg, which is situated along the Main River and was once an important stop along the Spice Road.  In fact, the name Wurzburg means “Spice City”, and the influence of this mercantile history upon the region is felt in the quaint marketplaces and cobbled streets. We will visit the Wurzburg Residenz, a large and elaborate Rococo palace that is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and its accompanying gardens.  We will enjoy a white wine tasting at the city’s stately wine cellar (northern Bavaria, known as Franconia, boasts some of the world’s best white wines). Still in Wurzburg, we will go to a medieval fortress on a hill that overlooks the city and explore its grounds and the nearby monastery, staying at the beautiful Hotel Maritim on the Main River through rolling vineyard country.

Wuerzburg Residenz

Moving south, we will enjoy some time in Rothenburg, a world-famous medieval fortress town in northern Bavaria, renowned for its city walls (which can be traversed, and from which you can see the rolling hills for miles around), and for its quaint central square, historical artisan shops, and restaurants—this is a great place for picking up Bavarian souvenirs skillfully made from wood and glass.

Later we will visit Nurnberg, seeing the beautiful central square of the city.  We will explore the Toy Museum (Nurnberg is known for its toy manufacturing,  particularly around Christmas time), and visiting the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände (Germans aren’t known for linguistic brevity), a somber, but enlightening World War II museum at the site of the Nazi Party’s rallying grounds.

Fairytale Castle, Neuschwanstein

Moving south from Nurnberg, we will visit Munich—site of the world-famous Hofbrauhaus, and the Marienplatz—home of the dancing glockenspiel.  There will be an optional excursion from Munich to the nearby site of the Dachau concentration camp. While this excursion isn’t for everybody, a trip to the site gives unparalleled insight into the lives and deaths of the millions of prisoners who fell victim to the Nazi mentality, and provides a good way to come to terms with the contrasts between the Germany of then and of now.

Leaving Munich, we will visit Neuschwanstein Castle—the “Cindarella Castle” that has come to be a symbol of Bavaria.  Nestled at the foot of the German Alps, a tour of this massive  and iconic castle lets you learn about “Mad King Ludwig” and soak up some regional history.

Our last stop will be in Garmisch Partenkirchen, a stunning mountain town on the Austrian border, and at the end of the Romantic Road.  GAP, as it’s

Munich, Germany

known by locals, is a high-end ski resort in the winter, and a quaint place for hiking and Bavarian-style outdoor activities in the summer.  The views in GAP alone make it perhaps the most beautiful part of the trip.  The trip will end here, and direct trains to Munich run every hour from the GAP station, making airport access very convenient, or alternative transportation can easily be arranged.

This trip will give you an appreciation of the culture of Germany, and specifically of Bavaria.  We will eat delicious and hearty German cuisine, travel along the high-speed and world-famous autobahns, see the stunning countryside, and learn all about the culture of Germany in the middle ages, during the European Renaissance, and World War II…and, importantly, we will come to love and understand the Germany of today!

Maggie Harris

Maggie Harris comes to AHA to head up research and development of a most important department; hotels and restaurants.  As I have pointed out  most recently in the post: “What is Cultural Immersion and How Do You Get It?“,  Hotels and restaurants are an integral part of our immersion process.  We are extremely particular, not simply that they are nice, but that they are characteristic of the place we are visiting, and Maggie gets it.

Years ago, when I started this business, research and development was maps spread out on a big table, some falling off to the floor, my favorite travel books with stickies everywhere, sharpees in different colors for different cities, and copious notes.  In those days, the web was less than useful.  The sorts of immersion spots I was searching for were years away from any web presence.  Fast forward.

Upon Maggie’s return from a recent trip to Paris, she emailed me a tip on a restaurant that AHA might want to use in the future.  Her email was so descriptive, insightful, and detailed, I felt I’d been right there, sitting across the table from her.  However, it wasn’t just what she said that caught my interest, it was that she was speaking my language.  The aspects that she swooned over were exactly the aspects I look for in and AHA restaurant.   From the food and “cultural” ambiance, to the welcoming staff and the location, she’d noted that all parts added up to, YES, and she wanted to share the information with me.  Little did Maggie or I imagine at the time, that that email was a sort of application and interview rolled into one.

A few emails later, realizing that I could trust Maggie’s judgment, I offered her this position, and she loved it.  With the AHA criteria understood, Maggie will scope hotels and restaurants in AHA destinations, online as well as through personal recommendations, compiling a list of places that I can try out while traveling.  This is a very, very important job, and Maggie will be GREAT at it.

• Maggie holds a Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership from Bethel University, and has worked or studied in Nicaragua, China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. She loves to travel and has visited more than 20 countries. Maggie and her husband Nick are the proud parents of two children: Kate (7) and Liam (5).
• Maggie is a leadership instructor at the University of Minnesota.
• Maggie Harris is the President and Co-founder of Ever After Gowns, a volunteer-run, nonprofit organization that donates prom gowns and accessories to high school students in need. She leads an incredible team of women who devote themselves to cultivating strong community partnerships that help build self-esteem and confidence in young women.

Now Maggie, armed with your virtual sharpees and sticky notes, welcome to the happy crew of Art History Alive!

1. Slow Pace
2. Historic Accommodations
3. Sites in, Under, and Above
4. Off the Beaten Track
5. Family-Run Restaurants
6. Meeting and Greeting Interesting Locals

Slow Pace. Similar to the slow food movement, in order to savor a place we hold back on pace.  AHA meanders, and soaks in a culture.

Accommodations. The place that you sleep on an AHA tour will be small, located in the historic center of where ever we are, and often run by a family that we now call friends. These are the people that each of you will get to know, and they will go above and beyond to make you feel at home in the city or area that they are immensely proud of. Whether we are in Tuscany, Florence, Rome, Paris, or California, our friends welcome us back with the warmest reunions. Needless to say, locating and building these trusted friendships has been a 15 year labor of love that you, our clients, will enjoy.

Pucci and Giovanni, owners Castello di Proceno

In, Under, and Above a Place. For example: AHA will wander you into tiny colorful towns, under a city through tunnels, whose construction dates back before Christ, and above the Pacific Ocean perched on a high cliff. We will take you down into a valley only to look up at an enormous and majestic rushing waterfall.

We Will Go Off The Beaten Track. In Italy, everyone goes to the beautiful Chianti region for wine tasting. We, on the other hand, have sought out tucked away wineries as to avoid the slick marketing of the “Italian Wine Country”. Instead, AHA enjoys visiting a large typical wine estate overlooking, for example, Orvieto. We taste the wines with complimentary foods under a frescoed ceiling. At other times we might visit a village wine co-op. Here everyone in the village pools their small private vineyard grape crop to make a wine that they divide up and will drink every day for the next year. The same is true in California. We will go wine tasting in the lesser known wine producing areas of Paso Robles, on the Central Coast, and Murphy’s in the foothills of the mighty Sierra Mountains.

Restaurant Choices Are Key. In Italy we will eat in family owned trattorie. This is the restaurant where wonderful smells waft as you walk in the door. They’re where Mama and Grandma are in the kitchen, Papa is at the fireplace roaster, Grandpa makes the coffee and sits at the cash register, and the kids are busing tables and taking orders. This is where they approach your table not with a menu, but instead with a list of what was cooked today, always fresh and only seasonal. They will take great pride in their homemade pastas, which will melt in you mouth, and their house wines which were probably made at the co-op mentioned above. This is too fun!

Roberto, Latte de Luna, Pienza

In California, Paris, and NYC we will take you to places that we know and trust – eateries that reflect the personality of the place we are visiting. From Clint Eastwood’s Mission Ranch steak house in Carmel, CA, to the best french fries in the world at L’Entrecote in Paris, where we enjoy our meals is an important piece to the immersion process.

You, Our Clients, Will Have The Opportunity To Meet and Greet Our Wonderful Friends. This is something NO other tour group large or small can boast.  As I have mentioned above, through the years of returning to these places, we have met and had the pleasure of getting to know, grocers in small towns, tiny hotel owners, restaurant owners, and vintners, all of whom are genuinely happy to see us again. We really enjoy our reunions and introducing our guests to them. This is so key in getting beyond the ordinary in a country. Now you are not simply an observer in a culture, but you are interacting with it. A huge difference and uniquely Art History Alive.

I am sure you will agree that when you add these experiences together, you will feel that you have been immersed in a wonderful culture. We do.

Elsie Floriani

Hello Everyone,

More great news for Art History Alive!  Please let me introduce to you, Elsie Floriani, Editor,  Impassioned Italian & Worker of Syntactical Wonders.

Elsie’s generous spirit and passion for correct spelling and grammar brought her to a very needy AHA.  I am a student of art history trying to write, and while Elsie enjoyed what I wrote, she put on her editors cape and swooped in to offer her services.  We are so honored and leaped at the opportunity to garner her word-wizardry.

Amazingly, our Elsie Floriani is the Founder, CEO, and Executive Editor of 18 Media, Inc., publishers of Gentry Magazine, Gentry Design, Gentry Wealth, and Gentry Health, now celebrating 19 years of successful publishing  in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is responsible for the editorial product, quality control, and community relations.  The magazine in general, and Elsie in particular, have received many awards and accolades along the way.

She has published a book, My Life As An Accordion, a collection of essays on life and living, and her second book, My Life in Leopard Print, made its debut earlier this year.

After 40+ years balancing her career, community involvement and leadership, Elsie says, “My life has been reduced to a series of Gs—Gentry, grandchildren, gardening, and golf.” “And,” she adds, “I am grateful and giddy with glee.”

We at AHA are giddy too, to have Elsie as a part of our team, and another G has been thusly added to her series: Generosity.  Thank you, Elsie, and welcome to AHA.

Fast Friends in Rome

Hi Everyone,
I would like you to meet my friend and Roman soul mate, Judith Testa. Judith is an author, a PhD in Art History, a columnist for Fra Noi (the Italian American newspaper of Chicago), a retired professor, and an awesome traveler. After reading her book, Rome is Love Spelled Backward, I did something that I never do. I sat right down and wrote a letter to the author. I expressed how illuminating the book had been for me and compared her book with my beloved copy of A Traveller In Rome, by H.V. Morton. I told her that within the first few pages I had realized that, for me, this book needed to be read with a highlighter in hand, and that now, many of its pages sported bright yellow markings, margin notes, and folded corners. I never expected to hear back, but hoped my letter would get through to her.
I did hear back, had one of those wonderful serendipitous connections, and made plans to meet in Boston soon. Judith would be flying in from her home in Illinois to visit friends in Boston, and I would travel north from our home in Connecticut. That meeting was, for me, magical and inspirational. We talked of Rome and loves there, we talked of art, on and off the beaten track, and the mystery of how we both could be so strongly drawn to this city. I said that it is like being caught in an undertow with the current always heading to Rome. We talked of not fighting what Judith described as “feeling a strange energy surge through her, a passion for the place that has never faded”.  I got dreamy as she described her trips to Rome, where she spends eight weeks every year.
Even though Judith and I have never again met on these shores, we hug each other warmly when we meet on the streets of Rome. For several years

AHA Guests With Judith in the Forum, Rome

now, almost annually, we connect. And with Judith and her wealth of knowledge as she shares “her” Rome with my husband Jim and myself, it’s as if we are on an AHA trip with my very fortunate guests.  Our friendship and admiration for each other has grown over the years, and now she and I can work together to make Art History Alive even better.
Many of you have read and enjoyed Judith’s book, as I strongly recommend it to anyone taking an AHA trip to Rome.  Front loading, or being prepared for a trip to a city like Rome is, in my opinion, essential. Rome is Love Spelled Backward is the perfect preparation, and it is the ONLY book I carry with me as I walk around Rome, whether I am with guests or on my own. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Whether you have been to Rome, are planning a trip , or are just plain interested, it is enlightening.

Rome Is Love Spelled Backward: Enjoying Art and Architecture in the Eternal City Anyone interested in the classic arts will learn something from Testa’s text, whether it’s the reason the Pantheon was built, the source of the Christian and Jewish catacombs, or the roles that Caravaggio and Bernini played in creating a baroque Rome. With fifty photos, narrative text and no information on shops, restaurants, or hotels, it’s a guidebook for sophisticated travelers who already know where to stay, but want more than a sentence on what they’re seeing. Everything is presented in welcome detail with background information for a fuller understanding of the sites that surround a visitor to the Eternal City. amazon.com

Judith Testa, as an art history consultant extraordinaire,  is a part of the Art History Alive team and we are so very glad to have her.  Watch for my next post, which will be Judith’s thoughts on Art History Alive, written for Chicago’s Italo-American Newspaper and Blog, Fra Noi (Between Us).

This is a gathering of the most professional women in the area and they are coming to hear the former CEO of eBay and recent entrant into the California Gubernatorial race 2010, Meg Whitman. Meg is a powerhouse and, needless to say, highly respected for her leadership. This annual affair also honors a select few outstanding young women of the community for their accomplishments. I decided that I wanted to sponsor this event by donating one of the few raffle prizes to be presented at the end of the evening. This was an opportunity to market Art History Alive to my target audience, and the type of women I like to travel with, as well as support a positive and powerful event.

I decided to design a California itinerary especially for this event that I could give away. The WIL Gold Rush Wines and Yosemite tour is a four day getaway. The prize included a beautiful piece of Brightman luggage, leopard print and all, as well as a bottle of delicious Hatcher Grenache Rose from the Sierra Nevada Foothills. The tour itself includes wine tasting in the Sierra Foothills, a two hour spa treatment, and two days in Yosemite, staying at the historic Ahwahnee Hotel. A prize designed with professional women in mind, and a trip that will pamper the body and refresh the soul.

The marketing power was that the three raffle prizes would be introduced, described and presented by San Jose/Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce President and CEO, Pat Dando. Pat is a highly respected, dedicated leader and advocate in both the Silicon Valley business and political arenas. She went above and beyond in her suspense building description of the AHA prize, and I was so pleased to see and hear that the audience loved it.

I had hoped to make an impression, for AHA, through my donation, but it made much more of a splash than I’d imagined. As Pat Dando described the trip, a very noticeable cooing could be heard from the audience, then just before she read out the winning number you could have heard a pin drop. The lucky winner, Marty Wohlwend, of Lockheed Martin, jumped out of her chair with a shriek of joy. Later, after photos, still shaking, we met and chatted, and amazingly Marty was an Art History major! She was beyond excited and we talked of what fun we will have on our trip.

This will stimulate some fun travel! When these women, and their companies, think about travel, I know that they will recall Art History Alive, and that is the prize I am after.

ART HISTORY ALIVE IMMERSION: The New Travel Edge
San Jose/Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce Advocate, February 2009, Vol. 81, No. 2 AND San Jose Business Journal, February 13, 2009, Vol. 26, No. 42.

Cynthia Quist, director of Art History Alive, may be a new member of the SJSV Chamber, but she actually grew up with it. Cynthia is the daughter of Ron James, the first directly-elected Mayor of San Jose who went on to serve as President and CEO of the San Jose Chamber of Commerce from 1974 through 1990. San Jose has always been a part of Cynthia’s life.

Over the past 25 years, Cynthia, with her husband Jim and their four children, have lived in Sydney, Australia, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, and have traveled extensively. Now, having returned home to California, Cynthia has taken her vast travel acumen and turned it into Art History Alive, a company devoted to cultural immersion travel. We asked Cynthia to define this type of travel. “It is the wrapping of clients in the art, history, and culture of a place. It is absolutely the most fulfilling way to travel.”

“First, group size is 4 to 8. Second, we stay in very historic hotels and castles. Third, our lodgings are typically located in the heart of the historic center of our destinations. Fourth, at a meandering pace, we visit the art and architecture of the locale, enriched by delicious traditional cuisine and local wines. Finally, the most valuable ingredient in cultural immersion is something that you cannot get in a larger group, and that is the gift of time. Time to think, digest, and just “be” in a place. Tight schedules do not exist for AHA.”

AHA travels to many beautiful and culturally rich places, but Italy is by far a favorite destination. “I have found that my clients are intellectually curious about Italy”, says Cynthia. “They want more than a survey tour, and their penetrating questions are proof.”

“Daily we challenge ourselves personally and professionally, and are able to absorb and learn new skills at an amazing rate. If we take that ability on a cultural immersion experience, you will be surprised at how enlightened you feel, and how this breathtaking art serves as a balance to our fast-paced lives.”

Here is the AHA recipe for cultural immersion:

1. Our groups are very small.
2. We move at our own pace.
3. AHA surrounds you daily with architecture and art that dates back hundreds and thousands of years. This puts our lives in immediate perspective.
4. Our meals are a social event, Italian style. Lunch and dinner with AHA are typically a slow-paced, multi-coursed affair, in warm and inviting family-run restaurants that we have enjoyed for years. Everything is prepared fresh and each course compliments the next. Around these tables we casually discuss what we have seen and experienced.

“It is so fulfilling for me to watch history become clear over a steaming plate of pasta and a glass of local red wine.”

For more information on Art History Alive and their destinations for 2009, visit www.arthistoryalive.com or call Cynthia Quist at 831.475.3807