Rekindle your joy of living!
Explore your inner artist!
Learn to celebrate your vibrant self, the Italian way!
Favignana, a gem of an island off the west coast of Sicily. Here you can experience not only a beautiful Mediterranean island with the typical warm turquoise waters and white buildings with magenta bursts of bougainvillea, but you can also experience a timeless genuine Italian place where the locals have deep roots and a traditional way of life, unharmed by tourism. The seascapes will sooth our souls and the vibrant Sicilian culture will help us engage more passionately with life.
Arrival Date: To be determined (early June, 2011)
Departure Date: One week later
Cost: $2,800 (Double occupancy. For single supplement add $130 to that price.)
Included:
- Daily sessions of either painting or creative journaling
- Painting instruction by renowned Colorado artist
- Historical/Cultural information provided by retreat leader, a Renaissance Historian.
- 7 nights accommodation at the island’s top hotel
- All meals! Breakfast, lunch and dinner
- Transfer from Palermo Airport to the hotel on the island
- Journaling exercises on following the heart & clarifying passions
- Boat tour to the island’s special beaches and grottos
- Marsala winery tour, including Marsala tastings and a full lunch.
- Also included, weather permitting, is a trip by boat to a surprise site— if you love art and history you’ll be truly awe struck by this site!
Additional activities that you may chose to engage in include snorkeling, relaxing at the beach, spa services, exploring the island by bike or by scooter, hiking up the island’s mountain, to the castle on top, or observing the culture and people of the island from a caffè in the town square.
Please note: most of the included meals are high-end, three course affairs, prepared with classic Italian attention and care. The meals are focused on fish, as is to be expected on an island, in a nation where cuisine is very regional. Arabic influences make for a wonderful and exotic cuisine on Favignana. Tuna fish has always been a big part of the island’s cuisine. Eggplants are abundant, cooked in a multitude of different ways, while wild fennel adds a unique flavor to pasta with fresh sardines.
This artistic retreat includes seven nights on the island of Favignana in a truly unique hotel: built from the same stone as the quarry it is located in, this hotel is surrounded by gardens of aromatic herbs and orange and lemon trees which fill the air with Mediterranean scents. With an excellent restaurant, a pool, hot tubs and stylish design, you are sure to feel pampered. This setting allows not only for total relaxation but also for the creative senses to come alive— here on one of the most unspoiled of all the Mediterranean islands.
As a participant on this retreat you’ll have a chance to taste top-notch Marsala wine. Near by, on the western coast of Sicily is the town of Marsala. To the Arabs it was Mars el’Allah, (Port of Allah) hence Marsala. We will visit Marsala and tour a Marsala winery. You will have the chance to taste the high-end vergine and riserva Marsala, which is not exported outside of Europe and will be a revelation to you if you are familiar only with the Marsala cooking wine in the U.S.
Favignana has been inhabited since prehistoric times (it is thought that it formed part of the main island of Sicily in the Palaeolithic times) and it witnessed a very important event in Antiquity: in these waters the treaty sealing an end to the First Punic War (241 BC) was signed, whereby Carthage handed over Sicily to the Roman Empire. Since the 1800s the fortunes of the island were inextricably linked with the Florio family (of the famous Marsala wine) after they invested in a tuna fishery on the island. Tuna fishing— the mattanza (the traditional ritual of killing the tuna) was, until recently, the principal means of earning a livelihood on the island. In recent years there have been very few bluefina tuna coming to spawn in these waters. The craving for sashimi in Japan and uncontrolled over-fishing around the world has taken its toll. The big cannery in Favignana’s port is now abandoned.
“For many women, the first choice, then, is to give ourselves the necessary time and space in which to renew our acquaintance with our lost voice, to learn to recognize it, and to rejoice as we hear it express our truth.”
— Florence Falk
