Our newest City Lab is all about wine. If you would like to experience a guided
wine tasting of Italian wines then this is the City Course you should consider.
Lead by Hande Leimer, a certified sommelier, your course will begin with an introduction to some of
the basic rules of wine tasting. Following, you will taste 7 or 8 Italian wines
- all from different regions and with different characteristic - an experience
that will provide you with an overview of Italy’s great tastes. Hande will guide you as you taste each of these wines, helping you to define
their aromas and to see their similarities and/or differences to wines you
might already know. But your course doesn’t stop there. You’ll also learn about the regions from which these wines come, for when you understand where a wine comes from and how it has been made, you
will enjoy each glass even more! By the end of the course, you’ll have a good idea of which wines you like and why, thereby allowing you to
choose wines that cater to your taste and needs in the future.
In Vino Veritas •
Wine Tastings with Vino Roma
Two-hour City Lab
One of the great Italian experiences is shopping for fresh foods in an open air
market. There's something ceremonial and almost sacred about a visit to Rome's Campo dei Fiori, the city's best known market. There's the crowd of shoppers looking for the
season's best fruits and vegetables as they craft their dinner menus; there are the vendors who know just which tomato will make the best spaghetti al
pomodoro; there's the friendly banter that means you'll be eating the freshest
fish in town; and there's the smell of just-baked bread coming from one of
Rome's best bakeries. This is not your everyday shopping routine; this is ritual.
You can enjoy the ritual of shopping in Campo dei Fiori in the company of our
market guru, Bill Guion. In his The Cook, the Cheese, the Wine and Its Lovers City Course, Bill shows you
how to find the best fruits and vegetables and he gives you cooking tips that
help you make the most of the season's freshest ingredients. All this information means that your cooking will never be the same! As you wander through the market with Bill, he'll tell you what makes Roman food
different from other Italian cuisines and he'll give you insights about how
cooking and eating are central social events in the life of any Roman family.
If you so desire, you can round out your culinary education by inviting Bill to
join you for a sumptuous lunch in a Roman trattoria where he'll school you in eating as the Romans do!
The Cook, the Cheese, the Wine &
It’s Lovers • What Should We Eat?
Two-hour City Lab
In the 18C and 19C it became fashionable for upper-class educated travelers to
spend a few months in Rome studying history and practicing art. This was called “The Grand Tour” and most Grand Tourists – Goethe, Turner, Corot, and Ruskin among them - documented their visit to the
Eternal City by keeping diaries embellished with drawings and watercolors.
Now we travel differently. We hurry. We dash from monument to monument, reading guidebooks as we go. We take photos. Sometimes we get home and can’t remember what our photos depict. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The next time you’re in Rome, take a day to slow down. Leave your camera aside and join City Scholar Augusto Balossino for our City
Sketchbook Course.
City Sketchbook •
If You Can See, You Can Draw
Half or Full Day City Labs
The City Course becomes a Suburban Villa Course as we venture out of Rome to the
small city of Tivoli, approximately 16 miles to the west. There we'll have the opportunity to
immerse ourselves in the luxury and splendor of two villas - one ancient and
one dating to the 16thC. At the 2ndC Villa of the Emperor Hadrian, we'll discuss ancient Roman ideas of
pleasure and we'll investigate the revolutionary principles of design and
construction embodied in Hadrian's architecture.
Then we'll continue to the Villa d'Este, designed by Pirro Ligorio, the architect in charge of the excavations at
Hadrian's Villa in the 16C. Commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, the Villa
d'Este exquisitely defines the Renaissance interest in the ancient concept of
leisure. Our exploration of this 16thC villa, a marvel of engineering and design with its
fantastic gravity-driven fountains and terraced hill slope, will focus on the
symbolic representation of the relationship between art and nature, and the two
cities of Tivoli and Rome.
Gardens of Earthly Delights •
There’s Nothing Like This in the Hamptons
Full Day City Lab
Junk Bonds in the Ancient World •
Was There an Alan Greenspan in the Antiquity?
Half Day City Lab
