Well-Read Travelers
adult study abroad & literary adventures for the young at heart
Welcome!
Well-Read Travelers offers literary travel experiences for adults who are looking for more learning, adventure, and creativity in their lives.
Our flagship programs are our compact study abroad experiences, which feature 4-6 weeks of online courses on a specific author or literary subject, followed by a luxurious international trip to the places at the heart of our texts.
We also have a range of shorter adventures, include curated weekend reading retreats, online seminars, and in-person field trips and workshops in the Los Angeles area.
Are you looking for a way to bring more literature and learning into your life? Do you wish there were a way to do study abroad as an adult, now that you have the resources to appreciate it in a new way? Would you like to meet like-minded lovers of learning? Rediscover—or discover for the first time!—the beauty of great literature, and learn how it can unlock new experiences of the world?
Join us for one of our upcoming programs!
Next Adult Study Abroad Programs:
Shakespeare’s Italy I: Florence, Verona, Venice
April - May, 2027
Immerse yourself in some of the most beloved literature in the Western world, on the page and in person. In Shakespeare’s Italy I, we’ll dive into three of the Bard’s most famous Italian plays, plus a selection of other poems and texts. Learn how the rich literary culture of Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, spread throughout western Europe and England, giving rise to many of the works we still discuss today—and even influencing Shakespeare to set one-third of his plays in Italy and create the feuding families, love-soaked soliloquies, and star-crossed lovers we know so well. Then travel to the cities where these works are set, visiting the places that inspired this unique literary moment and tracing the footsteps of Shakespeare’s characters—and perhaps even the author himself.
While you may have been to these cities before, we promise you haven’t visited them like this. Our itinerary is built around exclusive experiences we’ve designed with local Italian colleagues, friends, and other experts. You’ll go behind the scenes at sites you may have heard of and visit others you almost certainly haven’t. Alongside, we’ve built in ample time for sightseeing, enjoying local food and wine, and other non-academic pursuits.
April - May, 2027
The connections between the ancient past and the present are apparent all over Sicily, most clearly in the ancient Roman and Greek ruins that dot the landscape, sometimes in a city center, and sometimes in the middle of an otherwise vast, open landscape, like the Valley of the Temples. And from the ancient times to present, Sicilian stories are often tied to themes of travel, discovery and rediscovery, magic, and heightened emotions. From the strangely tragicomic character of Alcestis in the ancient Greek play by Euripides, to the fake deaths of Shakespeare’s Sicilian plays, to the sweeping drama of Lampedusa’s great 20th-century Sicilian novel The Leopard, this island lends itself to stories of confusion, emotions, and worlds-turned-upside down. In our Literary Sicily program, we’ll investigate why.
Our 4-week course will start with an overview of Sicily’s literary history and do a deep dive into a handful of texts. In the 11-day trip that follows, we’ll visit sites that inspired this literary history and experience the things that make Sicily justly famous, not just in literature: food, wine, the beauties of the Mediterranean, and its role as a nexus of global cultures.
