Bella Vivante

Bella Vivante, Professor Emerita of Classics, University of Arizona, has eagerly led college age and adult learners on many study tours through Turkey and Greece. She delights in repeatedly seeing the fantastic ancient to modern sites and artifacts herself and in sharing her enthusiasm with other interested learners. Her research focuses on ancient Greek poetry, especially Homer, ancient women’s' ritual and cultural roles, and on the figure of Helen as icon of femininity and poetic creation in ancient Greek and modern poetry. Her publications include: “"Helen in 20th c. Films,"” Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean, and a translation of Euripides’' Helen in Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides. Bella looks forward to sharing her love for the ancient world with its cultural artifacts and for the modern peoples and cultures encountered during her travels.

Dennis Romano

Dennis Romano is a specialist in the history of medieval and Renaissance Europe and the Mediterranean.  The Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History emeritus at Syracuse University, he is the author of dozens of articles and five books including The Likeness of Venice:  A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373-1457 and Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, both published by Yale University Press.  He is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.  He is currently writing, for Oxford University Press, a history of Venice from the city’s origins to the present day.

Albert Leonard

Albert Leonard Jr. is Professor Emeritus in both the Departments of Classical Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona. Al is an archaeologist who specializes in the social impact of interregional trade among the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean world. For more than four decades, he has directed excavations at a number of sites in Italy, Greece, Portugal, Egypt, Cyprus, Israel and Jordan. Throughout his career, Al has been active in educational outreach and, in 2006, the Archaeological Institute of America awarded him its Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award by which it “acknowledged and applauded the invaluable service that [he] has given to the archaeological community as an educator.”

As his alter ego, the Time Traveling Gourmet, Al combines his command of archaeological, historical, and literary material with culinary skills acquired at Le Cordon Bleu as well as the Culinary Institute of America (partially supported by a Robert A. Parker Wine Advocate Scholarship) in order to reconstruct (in the classroom or the kitchen) dishes described by such ancient authors as Archestratus of Syracuse, a 4th-century B.C. Sicilian cook who has often been called the “Father of Gastronomy.” Al presently divides his time between Boston, where he is a Research Associate at the Harvard Semitic Museum, and California’s Russian River Valley, where he is a member of The Society of Wine Educators and the Northern Sonoma County convivium of Slow Foods International.