Northern Italy: The Lake District, Tuscany, and the Dolomites

Lisa Passaglia Bauman is an art historian of the Italian Renaissance and professor of art history at George Mason University in Virginia. A recipient of the university’s Teaching Excellence Award, she is consistently praised for her ability to turn students’ required course in the arts into one of their favorite experiences at the university. She has served as the academic director for George Mason’s semester abroad program in Florence, Italy, and at Oxford University in England, and she currently runs two study abroad programs for the university: Art and Memory in Rome and Florence, a summer program that explores the classical world of ancient Rome and its rebirth in the Renaissance; and From Roman to Parisian: Shaping the Urban Experience in France from Antiquity to the Modern Period, a winter course in urban design.

Before coming to George Mason, Lisa worked in the Department of Museum Education at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she developed and presented gallery walks and public lectures on the permanent collection and special exhibitions.  Her years of lecturing in front of the artwork have informed her teaching as she strives to engage her students more intimately with the object, its history, and its cultural context. 

Joanne Ferraro is the Albert W. Johnson Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at San Diego State University. Her courses have covered the ancient Greek and Roman world as well as medieval, Renaissance, and early modern northern and southern Europe. She is especially interested in Europe’s cross-cultural and global connections with greater Asia and the Americas. Joanne has published books with Cambridge, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins University presses with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. She is the general editor of Bloomsbury Academic’s six-volume Cultural History of Marriage from Antiquity to the Present. Her latest book, The Renaissance and the Wider World, surveys the history of Europe between 1250 and 1600, an era of profound importance and renowned cultural achievement. Joanne has lectured for Smithsonian Journeys for the past decade, has lived and traveled in Europe for extensive periods, and is an enthusiast of the continent’s rich history and culture.

Sara N. James combines her passion for art, architecture, archaeology, gardens, and photography with her sense of adventure, love of travel, and enjoyment of people. She specializes in Italian Renaissance art with a particular passion for narrative fresco and stained-glass programs, but over her 30-year teaching career, Sara taught courses in Renaissance (Italian and Northern), Baroque, Greek, Roman, Medieval, and English art and architecture, as well as interdisciplinary honors courses. She is Professor Emerita of Art History at Mary Baldwin University, where she also served as director of the Renaissance Studies Abroad Program, teaching students on site in Italy and Northern Europe. In addition to teaching, she is a respected scholar and author of three books: The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Medieval Italy: Art, Devotion, and Liturgy in Orvieto (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Art in England from the Saxons to the Tudors: 600-1600 (Oxbow/Casemate, 2016) ; and Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto: Liturgy, Poetry and a Vision of the End-time (Ashgate, 2003), as well as numerous chapters, articles, and book reviews. Her speaking engagements include the Renaissance Society of America, the College Art Association, the Chief Executives Organization, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Chrysler Museum. Sara holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Virginia and is a member of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. She has spent three sabbaticals at the American Academy in Rome and one at the Paul Mellon Centre in London. An avid gardener and garden lover, Sara is a certified Master Gardener as well as a member of the Garden Club of Virginia, which has awarded her for her daffodils, and the Garden Club of America, which has awarded her for her photography.

Mary O'Neill is an art historian and art appraiser based in Washington, D.C. She lectures on various aspects of art history in locations around the world, such as Art Basel in Miami, the Chautauqua Institute in New York, and dozens of international cities for Smithsonian Journeys. Mary has published articles in several national publications, including a cover story for Smithsonian magazine, “Virtue and Beauty: The Renaissance Image of the Ideal Woman.”

Allan Langdale grew up on Vancouver Island wondering what the rest of the world was like and has spent much of his adult life finding out. Allan is an art and architectural historian, photographer, filmmaker, and travel writer who received his Ph.D. in art history from UC Santa Barbara. He has taught courses in Italian Renaissance art, Greek, Roman, Byzantine (including Georgian and Armenian architecture), and Indian and Islamic art and architecture. He currently teaches art history at UC Santa Cruz as a lecturer.

Along with several articles, Allan wrote the definitive architectural field guide to the little-known region of Turkish Cyprus, In a Contested Realm (2012) and also made the award-winning documentary film The Stones of Famagusta: the Story of a Forgotten City (2008). His travel books include Palermo: Travels in the City of Happiness (2015) and The Hippodrome of Istanbul / Constantinople: An Illustrated Handbook of its History (2019).

A popular Smithsonian Expert, Allan has traveled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea region, the Middle East—including Jordan and Egypt—and India.

Erik Gustafson is an architectural historian of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Islamic world, whose interests span from the ancient world into the early modern period. He has lived in Italy, France, and Egypt, and has traveled extensively in northern Europe, Iberia, and the eastern Mediterranean. Erik’s academic work addresses how specific sites were historically understood in light of broad intellectual and visual traditions. His current book project, Building Saint Francis, considers how the Franciscan order used architecture to shape and channel the legacy of their founder in the centuries after his death. While completing his PhD on the Franciscan architecture of Tuscany at New York University, he spent several years living in Florence and Rome. Erik has taught a variety of courses on art and architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Fordham University, Washington & Lee University, and George Mason University. He has published on Italian, Spanish, and French medieval architecture as well as Mamluk architecture in Cairo, and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Natalie Latteri holds a B.A. in History from the University of California at Davis, a M.A. in History from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in History with an emphasis in medieval European interfaith relations from the University of New Mexico. Her areas of specialization include Jewish and Christian religious history and she has extensive training in biblical and medieval Hebrew as well as ancient and medieval Latin, honed during her doctoral research at the archives of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. 

Natalie has been interested in world and religious history since childhood, when she developed a penchant for listening to her two grandfathers’ stories of their service in the Second World War. She has conducted research and traveled through England, Germany, Hungary, France, Basque Country, Mexico, and Italy, and is hoping to explore Northern Africa and East Asia in the near future.  

She currently teaches a variety of Humanities, History, and Religious Studies Courses—including Comparative Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Civilizations, Comparative Mythology, Fairytales and Folklore, and Jewish-Christian Relations—at Foothill College in California’s Silicon Valley and at the University of San Francisco. Her most recent research focuses on global conspiracy theories and their societal impact.  

Luca Zavagno is an associate professor in the Department of History and the Department of Archaeology at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He has authored many articles and essays on early medieval and Byzantine Mediterranean, covering topics such as urbanism, Cyprus from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, and the history of cross-cultural encounters in the medieval and early modern eras.

A graduate of the University of Venice, Luca obtained his PhD at the University of Birmingham with a dissertation on the society, economics, and politics of Byzantine cities in the early Middle Ages. He was twice awarded the Dumbarton Oaks Summer Fellowship as well as the prestigious Stanley Seeger Fellowship of the Hellenic Studies Center at Princeton University. He was also recently appointed one of Notre Dame University’s Andrew Mellon Fellows.