9 nights/10 days trip to Italy, to discover its rich history and artistic heritage—and above all their LGBTQ+ side, from Caesar to Michelangelo and beyond..

The splendor of ancient Rome…the glory of the Renaissance…the magnificence of the Baroque—Italy is the artistic treasure house of Western civilization. But there is a side to Italy’s story that most people aren’t aware of: gay Italy.  From the Caesars to Michelangelo to Visconti and Pasolini, Italy is a storehouse of gay history—and many of its artistic treasures celebrate same-sex love. Join us as we reveal the gay side of this amazing country.

Our tour begins in Florence, fountainhead of the Renaissance—and, as we learn, a fascinating window into the gay past. We revel in the city’s endless artistic treasures, while focusing on the Renaissance’s flourishing culture of same-sex love and the artworks its inspired—in particular, Donatello and Michelangelo’s two famous Davids, so very different from each other, yet both so intentionally homoerotic.

From Florence, we head to Naples, to visit the Archaeology Museum and its notorious Gabinetto Segreto—and to eat a pizza Margherita in the city that invented it.  We make Naples our base for visiting the ruins of nearby Pompeii; Paestum, with its beautifully preserved Greek temples and homoerotic wall-paintings; and finally Capri, pearl of the Mediterranean, where we explore its 2,000 year record of same-sex love, from the palace where Emperor Tiberius held his orgies, to the early 20th century, when the island was a European Provincetown.

Our final stop is in Rome—capital city of emperors, popes and artistic geniuses. We spend a solid four days in this great city, learning about the history of same-sex love as far back as the Etruscans, and discovering the secret lives of the emperors—from Caesar and Nero to Hadrian and his lover Antinous, worshipped as a god after his suicide. We follow in the footsteps of Caravaggio—rebel against artistic and sexual convention—and visit the settings of Tosca and other operas.

As always with Oscar Wilde Tours, the Gay Italy tour takes you to places that regular tours do not visit—from the underground ruins of a Roman Senator’s palace to the villas of Capri’s early 20th century gayocracy.

We learn about Italy’s gay side with Professor Lear and local guides who specialize in gay culture. And we relax in a series of exquisite hotels, while feasting on the cuisines and wines of three of Italy’s great culinary regions.

LGBTQ+ history tours of
well-known sights, including:

* The Roman Forum

* The Vatican Museum

* Pompeii

* The Uffizi and the Accademia

plus lesser-known sights, including

* The Capitoline Museums

* Tivoli

* The Naples Archaeological Museum

* Paestum

* The Bargello

Our trip starts with a walking tour in the center of the city, learning about the city’s key role in the Renaissance and the role of homosexual love in the Renaissance. Our afternoon ends with a visit to the Galleria dell’Accademia, where we see Michelangelo’s ‘slaves’ and the international symbol of male beauty, his David.  This evening, we start our exploration of Italian cuisine with a welcome dinner, a glorious meal of Florentine specialties, centered on the most famous bistecca alla Fiorentina, and Chianti wine.

Our hotel for 2 nights:  KRAFT HOTEL
An elegant and comfortable hotel in a quiet spot just at the edge of historic center, with a beautiful rooftop terrace and pool, with great views of the city.

Today, we visit two of Florence’s amazing museums, where we will discover the whole history of Florentine Renaissance art, from Donatello to Cellini. We start the morning at the Bargello, where we see several key male nude sculptures from the Renaissance, including Donatello’s David—the first freestanding male nude after ancient times; we then plunge into the Uffizi, the greatest of all collections of Renaissance painting. Bursting with masterpieces, the Uffizi is also a storehouse of homoerotic art by masters as varied as Botticelli, Caravaggio, and Bazzi (known to contemporaries as ‘II Sodoma’-Mr Sodom!). The afternoon and evening are  yours to explore this charming city, its museums, its wonderful fashion boutiques and artisan shops, and its charming restaurants.

This morning we take the express train to Naples, passing through the hills of central Italy. On arrival, we have the first of our Neapolitan meals-pizza in the city that invented it! We spend our afternoon visiting the great Naples Archaeological Museum, where we see the amazing collection of frescoes and statues that were excavated in Pompeii and other nearby sites. The Museum also has some fabulous homoerotic pieces, including the joint statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the male-male couple who were revered as the founders of the Athenian democracy; also, there is the fascinating Gabinetto Segreto, the collection of erotic art that until the 1960s was only open to “people of mature age and respectable morals” meaning adult men, of course! Evening free.

Our hotel for 3 nights:  NH Panorama.  Right in the middle of Naples—it gets a 100/100 score for walkability—the Panorama is a pleasant hotel with fabulous views of the city and the bay, especially the bay view from the breakfast room!

This morning, we drive south to Paestum, which, like many southern Italian cities, was in ancient times part of Magna Graecia (greater Greece) and today is home to some of the best-preserved Greek temples in the world. We visit the temples and the museum, which contains one of the greatest homoerotic images in ancient art: a wall-painting of a symposium, where, among other party games, a man courts a youth in the ancient Greek style. Lunch today is in a lovely restaurant overlooking the temples of Paestum.  We are in the heart of the world’s mozzarella production and will get to enjoy it. For the afternoon, we return from Greek culture to Roman culture and visit Pompeii, the ancient city at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius, buried by the volcanic explosion of 79 AD and rediscovered in the 18th century. This is the place where archaeology was invented and is still the world’s greatest archaeological site-a place unlike any other, where you can see right into the private lives of ancient people. Sexuality will, of course, be our special theme: Pompeii is rich in the history of the erotic, and full of many surprises, especially in the main bordello! The evening is yours to relax in Naples.

This morning, we take the hydrofoil out to Capri, the pearl of the Mediterranean. We spend the day exploring the island, famous for its beauty and for the rich and famous who have played there-and in particular for their same-sex relationships. After a boat ride around the island, we go up to the village of Anacapri, where we learn about the Emperor Tiberius and the orgies he supposedly held on the island as well as Capri’s gay culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the island was the site of a gay scandal that rocked the German empire. After a superb lunch comprising several dishes named for Capri, Caprese salad, Caprese cake (the best chocolate cake anywhere) etc, we visit the famous Villa San Michele, home of a fascinating 19th century figure, the great cholera doctor Axel Munthe. Munthe was straight-in fact, he was the lover of the queen of Sweden-but he was definitely an ally. In fact, his villa is the one place on the tour where Oscar Wilde stayed the night: Munthe discovered that Wilde and his lover “Bosie” Douglas had been kicked out of the island’s main hotel (as so often happened after Wilde’s imprisonment) and invited them to stay at the Villa. We spend some time in the garden, which recently won a prize as Italy's most beautiful (the views alone would win it!) before taking the ferry back to Naples for a free evening.

We take the train to Rome, where we start our visit with a walking tour through the central pedestrian area of this amazing city. We see many of the famous sights and many quiet, unknown nooks. We visit monuments such as the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona, the Trevi fountain, and the Piazza di Spagna with its famous staircase. With thousands of years of history in every street, we encounter some of the great gays of Roman history, from Hadrian, the “gayest” emperor, to Michelangelo, and Caravaggio, the artistic rebel and genius, as well as Rome’s great opera heritage. Along the way we make stops for coffee (at possibly the best cafe in Italy) and some of Rome’s famous gelato. The evening is free for your own explorations. Given that our hotel is in the absolute center of the city, there are many excellent restaurants nearby (please ask us for suggestions!)

Our hotel for 4 nights:  Albergo Santa Chiara. The Santa Chiara is a comfortable small hotel, and unbelievably central: it is right behind the Pantheon, and a couple of blocks from Piazza Navona, the Campo dei Fiori, and so on.

This morning we go underground for a sound-and-light show that will take us deeper into the ancient world, explaining the fascinating and complex history of an archaeological site, a recently discovered ancient senatorial palace just behind the Forum or Trajan. From there we climb the hill to Capitoline museum, with its magnificent collection—ranging from the famous she-wolf of Rome to Caravaggio’s strangely erotic St. John the Baptist—and its amazing view back onto the Forum (from an ancient corridor underneath the museum).  Then we go just around the corner to a charming, hidden piazza for a lunch you will never forget.  After lunch, we our first of Rome’s great art museums, the Galleria Borghese.  The Villa, a 17th century country estate built by a cardinal who was definitely somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, to give parties and house his family’s art collection, still has one of the world’s great collections, including several of Caravaggio’s homoerotic masterpieces. Evening free.

Our day begins with a drive into the countryside to Tivoli, where we visit two great villas: Emperor Hadrian’s country retreat (where, among other things, he built a temple to his lover Antinous, who was worshiped as a god after his death in the Nile), and the Villa d’Este, with its astonishing Renaissance gardens and fountains. After a lunch in a country restaurant famous for its local produce and wine, we return to Rome to visit Palazzo Massimo, the center of the city’s antiquity collections. Here we will see such masterpieces of Greco-Roman art as the Discobolus (a model of masculine form for the Greeks) and the sleeping hermaphrodite—a statue that has much to tell about the Romans’ sexual attractions—as well as the stunning garden frescos from the Villa of Empress Livia. Evening free.

This morning, we delve into the core of the ancient city—the Forum, the Palatine Hill that housed the imperial residences, and the Colosseum, famous for its ghastly gladiatorial combats. While exploring the archaeological sites, we examine the bizarre tales Roman historians relay about the emperors, in particular their complicated and lurid sex lives. Your afternoon is free for shopping, wandering, or more museums and churches.  But in the evening, we set out again, for something really special:  a chance to visit the Vatican Museums in the off-hours, when its great collection, and above all, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, can be enjoyed without overwhelming crowds. And after our Vatican visit, we have our farewell dinner, to toast Italy’s amazing history and art and some new friendships!

Our tour ends with breakfast this morning, but let us know if we can help you for further travel arrangements, in Italy or beyond!