By choice, we take on only a few journeys a year: it is the only way to hold the standard this high.
Travel as it was done before it was an industry.
For two centuries, a European education finished on the road: months in Rome with a tutor, a season in Naples, a winter of drawing and conversation. The point was never to see a great deal. It was to understand a few things properly, in the company of people who knew them.
Settecento arranges that journey now. Every itinerary is written from nothing, for one party, around what they actually want to learn. Nothing is packaged, nothing repeats, and nothing appears on a website.
We work with a small circle of historians, curators, conservators and families who open what they own. That circle is the reason we keep the year short.
We travel slowly: few places, and moments our guests keep for a lifetime.
Access
Collections, houses and archives opened outside their hours, arranged through people we know personally rather than through agencies.
Scholarship
Each journey travels with a historian, curator or conservator who works on what you are there to see.
Discretion
No names, no photographs, no published itineraries. Most of our guests arrive through another.
A quiet journey of the heart, in pursuit of Nature.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 1768