NextTribe Discovery Call: Questions about this or any other trip? Click here to schedule a phone call with Jeannie Edmunds, COO of NextTribe.
Italy has bewitched travelers for centuries, but two cities stand apart from all the others—not merely beautiful, but genuinely transformative. Florence, the city that bankrolled the Renaissance and still carries that genius in its very stones, and Venice, the impossible city—built on water, defying both logic and gravity for over a thousand years.
We’re bringing you both—done the NextTribe way. That means traveling with Shannon Faseler, our artist-guide and Italian art historian, who moves through these cities the way a local does: through the back streets of the Oltrarno, past the ateliers where bookbinders and goldsmiths still practice their crafts, and into corners that don’t appear in any guidebook. We’ve set this 9-day journey in March deliberately—when the crowds thin, the light softens, and both cities exhale. You can stand before Botticelli's Birth of Venus without jostling for position, cross the Rialto Bridge before the tour buses arrive, and actually hear the water lapping against ancient stone.
March in Florence means space to breathe in the Galleria dell’Accademia—a rare gift when you’re standing in front of the David, that astonishing 17-foot block of Carrara marble that Michelangelo transformed over four years into something almost unbearably alive. In Venice, it means golden afternoon light on the Byzantine mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica, and the leisure to watch the lace-makers of Burano work their intricate patterns on the steps of pastel-painted houses. And it means time to try your own hand at skills that have been passed down through generations here—gilding and the ancient art of fresco.
The itinerary covers everything worth seeing—the Uffizi, the Doge’s Palace, a Vivaldi concert in a candlelit church—but it never feels like a forced march through the highlights. There are aperitivo hours watching the Arno glow at dusk, mornings at the Mercato Centrale where Florentines actually shop for dinner, and a long, unhurried lunch beside the Rialto fish market, eating fritto misto while the vendors shout and haggle around you.
Shannon’s dual expertise—working artist and Italian art historian—means you’ll see Florence and Venice the way they were meant to be seen: not as postcard cities to be checked off, but as living, breathing arguments for beauty that have been winning people over for centuries. Come see why.
Please note that this is a sample itinerary. Accommodations and activities may change but we will always replace them with something of equal or better value.
An artist who actually knows these cities—Shannon is a practicing artist, an Italian art historian, and someone with deep personal ties to both Florence and Venice. Her knowledge goes well beyond what’s in the plaques, and her warmth makes every day feel like traveling with a brilliant friend.
Scenery that stops you cold: The cypress-lined hills of Tuscany rolling beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo at sunset. The view from the loggia of the Doge’s Palace across the shimmering Bacino di San Marco, gondolas rocking at their moorings. These are scenes that have moved poets and painters for centuries—and they work on you, too.
You’ll make things with your hands—not as a novelty, but as a genuine way into these cultures. Fresco-painting in a Florentine studio. Gold-leaf gilding in the tradition of the Renaissance workshops. Blowing glass on Murano with a maestro whose family has worked the furnaces for generations. And on Burano, watching the elderly lace-makers whose needle-work is so fine it’s been compared to spider silk.
The art and the food are equally extraordinary. The Uffizi’s Botticellis and Leonardos. Pasta made by hand in a Tuscan farmhouse. Cicchetti and spritz along a quiet calle in Venice. Biennale installations you won’t find anywhere else on earth. A bowl of ribollita so thick and earthy it makes you want to stay forever.
The women you meet…fellow travelers and animated locals who provide humor, friendship, and a reminder of what connects us all across the globe.
Shannon Faseler is a visual artist and art historian who works across media. Born in Texas, she holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
After exhibiting and teaching in California, where she ran the University Gallery, Shannon returned to Texas and now works from her studio in Wimberley. She continues to exhibit and curate at home and abroad, and delights in leading tours for college students and adult groups to Italy and beyond.
Need Travel Planning Help? If you would like additional assistance with your travel planning (both pre and post NextTribe tour), please reach out to Vanessa Sinclair. She is a seasoned NextTribe traveler, trip leader, and licensed travel advisor. Vanessa@journeysoftaste.com
Activity Level 3.5: You can expect at least 15,000 steps per day, sometimes on uneven cobblestone streets and hills. Occasionally, European hotels don't have elevators, so you need to be able to manage your own luggage.
If you would like to join the trip but aren't comfortable with this amount of walking, you may use local transportation such as cabs/ubers to get around the city (at your own expense).
"A newbie to traveling with NextTribe with no idea of what to expect. Any concerns I had dissipated the moment the tour started. Venice was spent in engaging conversations, fantastic food & wine, sight seeing, exploring, classes, and shopping. I now understand why so many people are frequent travelers with NextTribe." --A.R.D., Pflugerville, TX
"This trip brought Florence to life in ways I never expected. Art, culture, food, architecture, and history, all woven into days that felt genuinely magical. No stress, no logistics, just beautiful experiences and great company. It set a new standard for what travel should feel like." --Colleen M., Campbell, CA
After the long journey, Florence wraps around you like a warm embrace. Settle into your hotel, then let Shannon lead you on a gentle, unhurried walk through the neighborhood streets of the centro storico—past the workshops of the Oltrarno artisans and across the Ponte Vecchio as the light turns gold. You’ll stop at the leather shop of Shannon’s old friend Mossimo, where the smell of hand-tooled leather is reason enough to linger. The evening ends over a long, convivial dinner at a trattoria the tourists haven’t found yet—your first taste of the bistecca and bold Chianti that Florentines have been arguing over for centuries.
Included: Dinner
Gold-leaf gilding—the technique that made Florence’s altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts shimmer with unearthly light—was perfected here during the Renaissance, and this morning you’ll learn it from a master. The process is exacting and meditative: thin sheets of gold beaten to near-transparency, laid down with a breath. You’ll leave with a piece you made yourself, and a new understanding of why every great Florentine interior seems to glow.
The afternoon takes us through the design district—past perfumers who still compound their scents by hand, printmakers pressing marbled paper on antique presses, and leatherworkers whose surnames appear in the same trade registers as their great-great-grandparents. We’ll wind through the San Lorenzo quarter, where the magnificent 19th-century iron-and-glass Mercato Centrale buzzes with vendors selling porcini, aged pecorino, and blood-red Chianina beef, and the surrounding streets have been the center of Florence’s leather trade for hundreds of years.
Dinner tonight is at one of Shannon’s favorite destination restaurants—the kind of place where the menu changes with what arrived that morning and the wine list rewards curiosity. Bring your best outfit.
Included Breakfast, Dinner
We start at a local food market in the early morning, when the farmers are still unloading and the stallholders are drinking their first espresso. Then it’s out into the Tuscan countryside—olive groves, vineyards, the occasional medieval tower—to spend the day cooking alongside a Nonna in her farmhouse kitchen. She won’t rush you. By the time you sit down to eat what you’ve made, paired with the estate’s own wine, you’ll understand why Tuscans insist there’s no better table than one you set yourself. Free evening to wander at your own pace.
Included: Breakfast, Lunch
Shannon takes us deep into Florence’s layered history today—and she doesn’t sanitize it. The city that produced Botticelli and Brunelleschi also produced the Pazzi Conspiracy, the Bonfire of the Vanities, and the most sophisticated network of political intrigue in European history. With that context thrumming beneath every palazzo and piazza, we make our way to the Galleria dell’Accademia to stand before the David. Nothing quite prepares you for the scale of him, or for that famous unfinished tension in his expression—alert, coiled, already calculating. Street food lunch among the Florentines, a free afternoon to follow your own curiosity, then aperitivo on the hotel rooftop as the Arno catches the last light. Dinner at a neighborhood trattoria that has been feeding locals for generations.
Included: Breakfast, Dinner
This morning, you’ll work in the medium that covered every great church ceiling of the Renaissance—fresco, the demanding technique of applying pigment directly onto wet plaster so that as it dries, the color becomes permanently fused with the wall itself. Masaccio used it in the Brancacci Chapel just across the river. Ghirlandaio used it to train the young Michelangelo. Now it’s your turn in a private studio, guided by an artist who understands both the chemistry and the craft.
Afterward, you'll visit the Galleria Degli Uffizi--one of the largest and best-known museums in the world, which holds a collection of priceless works, particularly from the period of the Italian Renaissance. The experience, which will be guided by a museum expert, will be even more impactful experience after you’ve worked with gilding and frescoes yourself.
Included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
The early train from Santa Maria Novella station delivers you into Venice with the particular magic that only arrives when you step off a vaporetto and realize: there are no roads. No cars. Just water, stone, and the sound of bells.
After checking in, Shannon leads an afternoon through the city’s most captivating spaces—the gilded excess of St. Mark’s Basilica, whose four bronze horses were looted from Constantinople in 1204; the Gothic extravagance of the Doge’s Palace with its pink marble facades and the infamous Bridge of Sighs. She’ll also show us her Venice: the quiet campielli where neighborhood Venetians still hang their laundry, the mask-makers and marbled-paper studios tucked into alleys most visitors never find.
Included: Breakfast, Dinner
A boat across the northern lagoon brings us to Murano, where glassmaking has been practiced since the Venetian Republic relocated its furnaces here in 1291 (to keep the fires away from the city’s wooden buildings). The maestros here are the heirs to a tradition so jealously guarded that glassblowers were once forbidden from leaving Venice on pain of death. This morning you’ll watch craftspeople work with glass on the end of a blowpipe, shaped by breath and rotation.
Then we’re off to Burano—impossibly colorful, each house painted in its own hue so the fishermen could find their way home through the fog—for a long lunch and time to watch the island’s elderly lace-makers, who still practice a craft so intricate it takes years to master a single stitch.
Included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
For two weeks every February and March, Venice becomes the most elaborately costumed city on earth. Carnivale’s roots reach back to the 13th century, when masks dissolved the usual rules of class and propriety—a kind of licensed transgression the city has never entirely given up. This morning you’ll create your own mask with a master craftsman, learning the papier-mâché and gesso techniques that have changed little in five centuries.
The afternoon is yours to spend as you wish—revisiting a favorite campo, hunting down that shop you spotted yesterday, or simply settling at a bacaro with a glass of Prosecco as the parade of costumed revelers drifts past. This evening, a gondola glides you through the quieter canals as darkness falls, followed by a Vivaldi concert performed by candlelight in a deconsecrated church. It’s theatrical, yes—and completely, irresistibly Venice.
Included: Breakfast, Dinner
For two weeks every February and March, Venice becomes the most elaborately costumed city on earth. Carnivale’s roots reach back to the 13th century, when masks dissolved the usual rules of class and propriety—a kind of licensed transgression the city has never entirely given up. This morning you’ll create your own mask with a master craftsman, learning the papier-mâché and gesso techniques that have changed little in five centuries.
The afternoon is yours to spend as you wish—revisiting a favorite campo, hunting down that shop you spotted yesterday, or simply settling at a bacaro with a glass of Prosecco as the parade of costumed revelers drifts past. This evening, a gondola glides you through the quieter canals as darkness falls, followed by a Vivaldi concert performed by candlelight in a deconsecrated church. It’s theatrical, yes—and completely, irresistibly Venice.
Included: Breakfast, Dinner
After booking the trip, you will recieve a travel guide with more detailed logistics and information.
It's tempting to book flights right away to get the best deal. We advise you wait until the trip has filled and is confirmed to book your flights. If you want to do it sooner, make sure you have good cancellation terms or trip protection insurance.
Arrival: Florence (FLR) Saturday, March 13th. Please be at the hotel by 4:OO PM
Depart: Venice (VCE) Depart any time on Sunday, March 21.
Passport: Please make sure your passport is valid for at least 6 months beyond the end of the trip.
Visa: US citizens do not need a visa to travel in Italy.
ETIAS: This is a new authorization required to travel in the EU. You will need to get this prior to departure. Find out more here.
If you have any questions, you can contact our travel manager, Marcy, at travel@nexttribe.com
Inclusions
8 Nights Lodging
7 Dinners
3 Lunches
8 Breakfasts
Ground Transportation
All activities in the itinerary
Exclusions
Roundtrip Airfare
Passport & Visa Fees
Airport transfers for arrival/departure
Alcohol not mentioned in itinerary
Travel Insurance (required for international trips. Scroll down for details)
Gratuities to local guides, drivers, maids and hotel staff
This video will tell you if you’re a good fit for a NextTribe trip. We are proud that we’ve become known for how quickly and deeply our groups of women bond on our trips. One of our rules: No divas, please.
For more information, please contact our travel manager at travel@nexttribe.com