Shakespeare’s England

Four days in London, with several plays at the reconstructed Globe Theater, three days in Stratford, with several plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company theaters. Of course there will be plenty of talk about Shakespeare, but we won’t fail to explore the larger theater of the English Renaissance, with emphasis on Clay’s favorite English poet John Donne, and also Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, and much more.

Clay’s Notes: I lived in Britain for four years, where I studied at Oxford and explored the British Isles as often as possible. During my time at Oxford I was able to see 34 of the 37 Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet nine times. Although I spend a great deal of time studying history, my actual fields are English literature and classical culture. My daughter Catherine recently completed a degree in early modern history at St. Andrews University. My favorite English authors include Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dr. Johnson, James Boswell, Dickens, John Donne, John Keats, and of course Milton.

Cuba with Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemmingway. A full week in Cuba before it gets destroyed by American-style development. We start at Key West visiting Hemingway’s house there, then fly to Havana, where our Cuban explorations begin. Part of the time we will tour Hemingway’s Cuba, and the rest of the time we will re-live the Spanish American War, including, of course, Theodore Roosevelt’s heroic assault of San Juan Hill in July 1898.

Clay’s Notes: I’ve never been to Cuba, but my friend Wayne Fairchild, the outfitter of my Lewis and Clark cultural tours, has been several times and he is most eager to take care of our hospitality needs there. Roosevelt is one of my principal historical interests. I so want to see Cuba before the Costco imperialists take over. And Hemingway? What could be better than that?

Robert Oppenheimer’s Desert Southwest

My favorite historical character is J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Atomic Bomb. He’s truly a tragic figure, the one who built the bomb (flawlessly, on time, under budget, in time to affect the outcome of the war) but said, at the first test, “I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.” Los Alamos is endlessly interesting, but we will also visit Alamagordo, where on July 16, 1945, the first atomic device in human history was detonated. Much of our exploration will be Oppenheimer’s desert world (he said his two great loves were deserts and physics, pity they could not be combined!), but we will also talk about morality and technology, appropriate technology, and the world of weapons of mass destruction. This journey will require about six days.

Rome and Italy

Clay has been spending approximately six weeks per year in Rome teaching for a Catholic liberal arts university. This trip will require about 11 days: four in Rome (ancient Rome, Renaissance and Baroque Rome, Enlightenment Rome, Mussolini’s Rome), three in Florence and surrounding territory, two days in Naples (including, of course, Pompeii), and two more days in north central Italy where we will visit several of the Palladian villas in Vincenzo. Wine, pasta, architecture, history, music, and more. Clay will be joined by his Italian-speaking friend Thomas Schulzetenberg, who spent four full years in Rome for the University of Mary.

Clay’s Notes: I’ve fallen in love with Italy in the last few years. Jefferson only saw a bit of northern Italy, but he would have been so smitten with the Pantheon (in my view, the world’s most beautiful building) that he might never have returned to Virginia. I cannot get enough of Bernini’s sculpture or Caravaggio’s painting, but these are just a couple of my Rome passions. My intellectual passions include the classical world, the emergence of Christianity as a world culture, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and more; and I have a strange special fascination with Mussolini, whose “footprint” in Rome is huge. We’ll read Vergil’s Aeneid together and some of the lives of Plutarch. Mostly we will just luxuriate in a world that never ceases to intrigue us.