Here’s a blog post that I wrote last week for the Gay and Lesbian Review about our gay Italy tour. The GLR has decided to recommend our tour to their readers; the Leslie Lohman Museum will also recommend us to their members soon. These are institutions of which I think very highly, so I am thrilled to have won their good opinion!
I find people often like to hear about how we come up with the idea for our products, so I wrote about how we decided to do an Italy tour this fall. It was partly because it was so much work for me to put together the Oscar Wilde 
tour last year: doing three countries in one tour is expensive for the customer and complicated for the company. So I decided to stick to doing one country at a time for a while. But it wasn’t easy to choose which country! Of course we can do the other top contestants next year and/or the year after: gay Greece and gay England. Plus we will soon put together a series of 3 day weekend gay history tours of important cities, starting with Paris and Berlin.
But the Italy tour won out because it will be such a pleasure to give. Italy has so much great art and such great food—and so much gay history, especially in ancient times and the Renaissance. As the blog post says:
“After all, think of the Roman emperors, such as Nero, who married two of his male slaves (one as the wife, the other as the husband); or Hadrian, who had his boyfriend Antinous made into a god after he drowned in the Nile. There are so many statues of Antinous that we could almost do an Antinous tour: here he is, for instance—in the Vatican!—as a combination of the Roman god of wine Bacchus and the Egyptian fertility god Osiris. And think of the major Renaissance artists who were gay or at least fascinated by sexy male bodies: Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Cellini, Caravaggio.
Italy is full of artworks like Donatello’s David—the first fully nude male statue since ancient times—and who but a Renaissance Italian would have thought to portray a biblical hero as a sexy, effeminate boy? After we thought about it for a while, the choice was clear.”
To read the whole post, click on: http://www.glreview.org/why-italy-is-the-gay-place-to-go/
And to learn more about the gay Italy tour–or to book–click on: Oscar Wilde’s Gay Italy Tours
