A Private Half-Day in One of the World’s Great Cities, Following the Story of a Woman Who Changed It — and Discovering What Her Journey Says About Yours
There is something that happens when you stand in a specific place where a specific person made a specific choice that changed everything.
It is different from reading about it. It is different from watching a documentary. It is different even from visiting the museum that now commemorates the moment. It is the particular quality of understanding that only arrives when your body is in the same geography where the story happened — when the light falls the same way it fell then, when the streets are the same streets, when the city that shaped her is the city you are standing in.
The Heroine’s Journey Certification Programme has been staging these experiences for years — walking through Paris where Chanel redefined what elegance was allowed to mean, standing before Artemisia Gentileschi’s canvases in Florence, following Virginia Woolf through the streets of Bloomsbury. These walks are the experiential heart of the certification: the moment when the biographical becomes physical, and the physical becomes personal.
Now that experience is available as a standalone private offering — for individuals, for pairs, for small groups of up to six — without the full certification commitment.
What is the Biographical City Experience?
The Heroine’s Journey Biographical City Experience is a private half-day — three to four hours — in one of nine cities, guided by a certified Heroine’s Journey Guide who has been trained in Peter de Kuster’s biographical storytelling method. The walk follows the story of one heroine whose life is woven into the fabric of that city: the streets she walked, the buildings she inhabited, the places where the pivotal scenes of her journey happened.
But the walk is never only about her. It is always also about you. At each stop, the guide asks a question that the heroine’s story opens for the walker: What would you have done at this moment? Where in your own story do you recognise this choice? What does it tell you about where you are in your own journey right now?
The walk ends with a thirty-minute reflection session — in a café, a garden, a gallery — in which the guide helps you draw the thread between what you have learned about her journey and what it has revealed about yours.
The nine cities and their heroines:
Paris — Coco Chanel: the woman who redesigned what power was allowed to look like. Florence — Artemisia Gentileschi: the painter who turned injustice into the most powerful art of her era. Venice — Peggy Guggenheim: the collector who trusted her own eye when almost no one else did. Berlin — Marlene Dietrich: the star who chose exile over the performance her country required. New York — Martha Graham: the choreographer who invented a new language for what the body knows. London — Virginia Woolf: the writer who mapped the interior life with the precision of a cartographer. Rome — Sophia Loren: the actress who made strength and vulnerability the same gesture. Madrid — Penélope Cruz: the performer who refused to be diminished by the industry’s definition of what she was. Barcelona — Lluïsa Vidal: the painter who claimed the studio in a world that had not yet agreed to give it to her.
Who this is for:
Women — and the men who love working alongside women — who want an experience of the Heroine’s Journey that is physical, personal, and impossible to forget.
Leaders, coaches, HR professionals, and creative directors who want a team experience unlike anything a conference room can produce.
Anyone visiting one of these nine cities who wants to do something with their time there that is more than tourism — who wants to come home changed.
Investment: € 350 per person for a private or small group experience (up to six participants). Available in all nine cities. Dates by arrangement. Contact Peter to discuss your city and your heroine: peterdekuster2023@gmail.com
She walked these streets. So can you. The difference is that now you know what to look for.