France and Italy with International Council for Cultural Exchange

We highly recommend the France-and-Italy opera trip offered by the International Council for Cultural Exchange, or ICCE (426 South Country Rd., Ste. 1, Brookhaven, NY 11719; phone 800/690-4223, e-mail info@icce-travel.org).

On our trip, April 19-May 1, ’03, there were only four of us plus our excellent trip leader, David Shengold, who was very knowledgeable about music and art and spoke both Italian and French. The 2004 price of this tour, including air from New York, is $4,598.

We arrived in Milan on Easter Sunday and checked into the Starhotel Rosa, a very pleasant 4-star hotel and, like all the other hotels on our tour, centrally located.

Highlights of our tour included a trip to Castello Sforzesco, where we saw Michelangelo’s last work, the unfinished “Rondanini Pieta,” which was very moving. Because La Scala was undergoing renovation, we could not see an opera performance there, but we did go to an out-of-town ballet based on “The Taming of the Shrew.”

At Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa we attended “La Boheme.” Our next stop was Turin, where we saw a replica of the Shroud of Turin. The actual Shroud is kept in a closed box just behind the replica and displayed only once a year, on Good Friday, because it is so fragile. In Turin we also visited the truly outstanding Egyptian Museum, which houses the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts in the world outside of Cairo. At Turin’s Teatro Regio we heard Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte.”

We then had four days in Paris, where we visited all four of the concert halls and saw performances, including a magnificent production of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Before every performance, David gave a presentation about the music and a description of the story, played tape recordings of the themes and offered suggestions about what to listen for. We found that this added greatly to our enjoyment.

In each city, local guides took us sightseeing and we also had a lot of free time. David had good suggestions about places to see, and he often accompanied us, providing a lot of information.

One aspect of this tour that we especially liked was that only two meals a day were included: a large breakfast and then either lunch or, more commonly, dinner. We’ve found that many tours with three meals a day give us too much food.

We certainly recommend this tour to opera lovers everywhere and also to music lovers who are perhaps not too familiar with opera but would welcome such a grand introduction to it.

ANNE CUSICK
Kodiak, AK