Dublin Decoded have offered a range of wonderful, in person art tours in various galleries and museums in Dublin for over 10 years, including the Chester Beatty Library, the Municipal Hugh Lane Gallery and most notably, countless tours of the wonderful National Gallery of Ireland, covering many different aspects of the collection there.
As of October 2025, we are now running occasional, small group, high-quality, real in-person art excursions, to overseas art destinations overseas. Our inaugural trip ran from 28th of October to 01st November, 2025 and visited the magical city of Venice in Italy. The trip included expert tours inside the Basilica San Marco, the Doge’s Palace, Frari Church, the Peggy Guggenheim collection, Zanipolo Church, and the Academia Museum, where we saw works by Titian and members of the Bellini family, and two of Venice’s famous scuole – Scuola Grande di San Rocco to see works by Tintoretto and the mush smaller Scuola Dalmatia, to see the lovely paintings of Carpaccio. This was in in addition to a series of superb, expert-led walking tours of the beautiful city of Venice itself, led by the outstanding Francesca de Stefania. Entry tickets to all sites and museums were included in our trip, including expert commentary by Francesca and by Arran, as well as four nights accommodation, breakfast each morning at our exceptional hotel, plus a welcome and farewell dinner.
We were fully subscribed – with 12 guests – and the trip was an enormous success.
Following the great success of that Venice trip, it is now anticipated this will be the first of many such trips over the next 5-10 years. Future trips will include Rome, Florence, Venice again, and (on a separate trip) the amazing Veneto region that surrounds Venice on the mainland, and which includes the great Italian art cities of Verona, Vicenza and Padua. These trips all lie in the medium term future. – the next 2- 4 years- so we do not have firm dates yet. However, we are delighted to confirm our next overseas art trip, to Rouen and Normandy, 18th to 23 May 2026
A lot of work and planning has already been done and we are very confident by this point that the trip will go ahead. For more details please see here. And for those who merely wish to save the dates however, the dates 18th to 23 May 202 are more or less definitive.
For more information on our upcoming, online Art course on French Art, and/or our Art-Lovers Trip to Rouen and Normandy 18th to 23rd May next year, please see here.
Images below: the eternally beautiful San Zaccaria altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini, still where it was intended and painted for, in the church of the same name. Somewhere we always go to visit when in Venice. Further below, the magnificent Gothic facade of the cathedral of Rouen, and a painting of the same subject by French impressionist Claude Monet.
