On 3-week group tour
My family calls me the Bethesda Brit. I’ve spent so much time traveling in the United Kingdom that London’s almost a second home.
But I had long hoped to immerse myself in another place: Florence, the city where the Renaissance began around 1350 and — for most art history buffs — the center of the world. My husband and I had traveled there several times over the past few decades, but never for more than a few days. On a couple of group tours, we had stayed outside the city and been bused in for the afternoon to visit the must-sees: Michelangelo’s David statue and the Uffizi Gallery. On those visits, I would wander as much as time allowed.
That usually wasn’t much, and I was left wanting more. So when I saw a three-week Smithsonian Journeys package called “Living in Italy” and based in Florence, I booked the May trip. I would go solo — it was too long for my husband’s taste — and join a group of about two dozen Americans in their 60s and 70s, as well as three octogenarians, most of whom had never been to Florence before.
Road Scholar, the nonprofit tour company specializing in
“learning adventures,” offers a six-week Florence stay, but I saw two main drawbacks: Its Florence version includes a daily morning Italian language class as part of the itinerary, and it places the participants in different apartments.
The Smithsonian Journeys program instead offers studying Italian as an option (about a third of our group took the classes), and it houses the entire group in an apartment hotel, offering greater potential for camaraderie.
The neighborhood near our apartment hotel, in the San Jacopino district near the edge of Florence, was where most of us gathered informally for dinner, showing up and joining the locals around the town square. Our tour leader told us that the trip had been based at a hotel in the center of town before the pandemic, but our little neighborhood offered a more intimate side of city life without sacrificing convenience. It had a greengrocer and several small shops, offering easy access to basics for our apartment kitchenettes, and it was just a 10-minute tram ride into the heart of Florence.
“Staying in one place to meet the shopkeeper down the street, know where to get a good cup of espresso, understand the story in the streets, those were big advantages,” Scott Baird, a retired linguistics professor from San Antonio who was in
the group, said in an email.
A typical day for me began with grabbing a pastry on my way to the tram. I prefer early starts, and by getting to Florence’s center before 8:30 a.m., I was able to experience the city coming to life, not yet so busy that I needed to dodge traffic or other tourists. At this time, one can clearly see the ancient, uneven stones of the empty streets lying ahead of you. There’s no better way to sense the centuries you’re walking through.
Because I wanted as much independent time as possible, I was satisfied not to have opted for the weekday Italian classes, although those who took them found them to be fun and valuable. I revisited many places seen on earlier trips, but I added many others that are rarely visited by tourists. There was time at each place — usually churches — to sit, look up, contemplate, read pieces I brought along and listen to podcasts to guide my looking. (One with deep dives on most Florence connections and meet people,” she said. Many of her return visits to Triple Creek Ranch have been mini-reunions, where Patrick has reconnected with fellow horse lovers.
The opportunity to meet people on vacation is easier at adults-only properties, agrees Christa Adymy, who makes a point to seek out kid-free resorts.
A breakup some nine years ago led Adymy, then 31, to travel by herself to Club Med in Turks & Caicos. “I wanted to find somewhere I could meet people and have fun,” she said. Adymy is still friends with some of the people she met on that trip, and has since stayed at adultsonly properties in Bali, Jamaica and Aruba. The sights is “Rebuilding the Renaissance,” by art historian Rocky Ruggiero.)
The longer stay gave me time to visit places that were farther afield, such as San Salvi, a church that is part of an 11th-century abbey complex. There, in the abbey’s refectory, the colors of the 16th-century “Last Supper” fresco by Andrea del Sarto are still bright, unlike those of Leonardo’s famous “Last Supper” in Milan. If San Salvi were closer in, that fresco would be on the greatest-hits circuit. Farther still, I took the train from Florence’s station, just three stops away on our tram line, to Bologna for an overnight stay, and to Pisa for a quicker impact of not having kids around, the lack of a family atmosphere, allows adults to be more relaxed, looser and even a bit childish, Adymy said.
Although Steve and I didn’t make plans to stay in touch with any of the people we met at Hotel Wailea, we definitely found it easier to strike up conversations and engage with couples focused on their own good times – not on their kids’ needs or nap schedules – and I also detected a more whimsical attitude, perhaps harder to attain amid familial obligations.
For many parents, an adults-only stay means multiple date nights in a row and a chance to reconnect and recharge, something that Juliet Izon, a one. Our Smithsonian Journeys itinerary also included day trips to several Tuscany destinations, such as Siena, Lucca, San Gimignano and Cortona.
We had enough unscheduled time to indulge our own interests. I spent three hours at the early Renaissance basilica of Santa Maria Novella, where Masaccio’s centuries-old “Holy Trinity” fresco is celebrated for its experiments with perspective. (One reason Florence attracts art history buffs is that it offers the thrill of seeing breakthrough paintings in situ rather than in museums.)
There was also plenty of time for wandering. I listened lifestyle writer who lives in New York City with her husband and 6-year-old daughter, says is important. It’s a chance to “connect with your partner and just do the little things that you really miss from your prekids life. So sleep in and eat a really late-night dinner and drink and not worry about being hung over, caring for your kids the next morning.”
Izon noted that the food options at adults-only resorts, such as Magee Homestead in Wyoming, where she and her husband stayed in 2019, “can sometimes be more exciting, because they’re really only catering to adults.”
Patrick also appreciates the cuisine typical of restaurants at the adults-only to an Audible recording of Anne Holler’s “Florencewalks,” which divides the city into quadrants with cues of where to stop and look. It was a great way to see details such as coats of arms perched high on the facades of Renaissance palaces of once-powerful families while listening to their histories. It pointed out homes of famous nonFlorentines and narrated the early stories of some of the greats — Dante, Michelangelo, Machiavelli — along the streets where they once lived.
One day was my gardens day. I climbed down the steep hill from my favorite church, San Miniato al hotels she visits, where
“the food is a step up. The dining experience is a step up.”
The Alila Napa Valley, an adults-only hotel in a “predominantly adults-only destination,” as Ty Accornero, the general manager, puts it, is heavily invested in the property’s culinary chops – evidenced by hotel restaurant Acacia House’s enlistment of chef Chris Cosentino (a “Top Chef Masters” winner). “The property was designed as an intimate retreat (from the architecture and design to the spa and incredible dining on-site),” Accornero wrote in an email.
The “very private, luxury, and romantic escape” that Hotel Wailea founder
Monte, to visit three that were in full bloom. First came Florence’s Iris Garden, holding its annual competition. A bit lower, the city’s vast Rose Garden, with locals sunbathing on the lawns among the roses. Then lunch on the loggia at the Bardini Garden, with its panoramic view of the city and glorious wisteria tunnel.
I look back on those three weeks in a different way than I look back on other group trips — and I have taken many. There was much seen, much accomplished. But, for some reason, it is less of a blur. And my fellow travelers remain with me like colorful characters in an unfaded fresco.
McManus said guests love plays out in similar fashion at hotels around the country, such as the Wauwinet in Nantucket, Mass., and the Hilton Head Health in South Carolina. In December, the Four Seasons brand is opening its first adults-only luxury tented resort in the Americas.
Named Naviva, the Punta Mita, Mexico, resort is a response to what travelers want, says John O’Sullivan, regional vice president and general manager at Four Seasons Resort Punta Mita. He cited research that revealed “a demand by people – some of whom have children, by the way – who want to have a level of escape and a level of selfdiscovery which just does not include children.”