THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY: ROME

Rewrite Your Story. Transform Your Life & Business.

A private, five-day immersive coaching journey through Rome for women leaders, entrepreneurs, and coaches, led by Peter de Kuster and inspired by The Power of Your Story.

Step away from the noise of daily operations and enter the deeper story shaping your life, your leadership, and the people you guide.

Over five unhurried days in Rome, combine cultural discovery, executive coaching, meaningful conversation, and structured reflection to write your next defining chapter, through the lives of the women who wrote theirs here.

This is not a seminar. It is a journey through the architecture of a meaningful life: the story that gives you energy, the inner characters that shape your choices, the plot you are living, the conflict asking for your response, the ending you are creating, and the larger journey that turns insight into lasting impact.

A Journey, Not a Seminar

Rome is a city that has been rewritten again and again, and women have been writing it for nearly three thousand years.

It is the city of Hortensia, who stood in the Forum in 42 BCE and argued before the most powerful men in the Roman world that women should not be taxed without a voice. Of Livia, who shaped an empire from beside the throne. Of Catherine of Siena, who crossed Italy to persuade a pope to come home. Of Artemisia Gentileschi, born here, who turned a brutal ordeal into some of the most formidable paintings of her century. Of Maria Montessori, who opened a school for the children of a working-class district and changed how the world thinks about learning. Of Anita Garibaldi, who rode into the defence of the Roman Republic. And of the twenty-one women who sat in Italy’s Constituent Assembly in 1946 and helped write the country’s new constitution.

From the Roman Forum and the Capitoline Hill to the lanes of Trastevere, from the baroque halls of Palazzo Barberini to the terraces of the Pincio, Rome is a living theatre of women’s transformation.

The Heroine’s Journey: Rome uses the personal stories of the city’s women (rulers, saints, artists, scientists, resisters, performers, and the heroines of its literature, opera, and film) as mirrors for your own story.

The heroine’s path is not always a straight line toward a summit. It moves through separation and achievement, through the cost of success, through descent and reckoning, toward reconnection and integration. You will examine the narrative that has brought you here and consciously create the one that will take you forward.

Rome was not built in a day, and neither is a life. This is an exclusive, personally paced immersion centred on your ambitions, challenges, and future.

The Story You Live

What story are you currently living about who you are, what you can achieve, and what others expect from you?

Perhaps you have succeeded by being the capable one, the one who holds everything together. Perhaps you are entering a more senior role, scaling a business, navigating change, building a coaching practice, or asking: What comes after the chapter I have already mastered? Perhaps you have achieved what you set out to achieve and noticed that something essential was left behind on the way.

Across five structured phases, you will examine your inner narrative with honesty and precision.

The aim is not superficial positive thinking. It is a more truthful, energising, and purposeful story, supported by concrete decisions, behaviours, and action.

The central question:

Where can my current story no longer take me where I want to go?

Who This Is For

This journey is designed for women leaders and guides who want space to pause, challenge long-held assumptions, and align their work with a clearer purpose.

It is for:

• Executives and entrepreneurs navigating strategic pivots, growth, succession, or legacy transitions.
• Executive and team coaches developing a narrative-based approach to client transformation.
• Consultants and mentors guiding others through complex, high-stakes decisions.
• Women who have succeeded by the rules of someone else’s story and are ready to write their own.
• Leadership partners seeking deeper alignment around a shared vision.
• Private groups of colleagues, peers, or leadership teams seeking a meaningful strategic reset.

The programme is booked privately for an exclusive group of up to four participants.

What You Will Explore

The Power of Your Story

Discover the narratives that drain your energy and the ones that mobilise focus, courage, and purpose.

Rome offers extraordinary examples of women who dared to rewrite their stories: the quiet authority of Livia, who held power without holding office; the courage of Catherine of Siena, a dyer’s daughter who advised popes; the creative independence of Artemisia Gentileschi; the daring of Queen Christina of Sweden, who gave up a crown and chose Rome; and the determination of Maria Montessori, who became one of the first women in Italy to earn a medical degree.

Their lives reveal different ways of responding to ambition, adversity, identity, and change.

You will identify the story you have been living, the story you have outgrown, and the story you are ready to write.

Your Twelve Inner Characters

Meet the recurring roles through which you lead, relate, decide, avoid, and grow.

Explore the twelve archetypal characters through the extraordinary women and stories of Rome:

• The Innocent
• The Orphan
• The Warrior
• The Caregiver
• The Seeker
• The Lover
• The Destroyer
• The Creator
• The Ruler
• The Magician
• The Sage
• The Jester

Rome provides fascinating mirrors for these characters:

• The Innocent in Cabiria, the heroine of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, played by Giulietta Masina, who keeps believing in love and goodness after being betrayed.
• The Orphan in Anna Magnani, born in Rome and raised by her grandmother, who became the fierce, unforgettable face of the city on screen.
• The Warrior in Anita Garibaldi, who fought for the Roman Republic in 1849, and in Cloelia, the young hostage who, according to Roman tradition, escaped her captors by swimming the Tiber.
• The Caregiver in Maria Montessori and in Frances of Rome, who tended the sick and poor of the city in the fifteenth century.
• The Seeker in Queen Christina of Sweden, who abdicated, left everything familiar, and rebuilt her life in Rome, and in Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian writer who came to Rome and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• The Lover in Tosca, Puccini’s opera heroine, whose passion for her lover and for her art drives her to the edge of Castel Sant’Angelo, and in Cleopatra, who lived in Caesar’s villa on the Tiber.
• The Destroyer in the Roman women who filled the streets in 195 BCE until an old law restricting their lives was repealed, and in Judith, whom Caravaggio painted in a moment of decisive, unflinching action.
• The Creator in Artemisia Gentileschi, in the Roman novelist Elsa Morante, and in the Sorelle Fontana, the Roman sisters whose couture house dressed the stars of the postwar screen.
• The Ruler in Livia Drusilla, Agrippina the Younger, and Queen Christina, women who understood how power is built, held, and lost.
• The Magician in the Sibyls, the prophetesses painted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and in the Vestal Virgins, keepers of Rome’s sacred flame.
• The Sage in Catherine of Siena, Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Nobel-winning scientist who spent her later years in Rome, and Hortensia, the orator of the Forum.
• The Jester in Princess Ann of Roman Holiday, who cuts her hair, rides a Vespa through the city, and discovers the power of play.

You will identify:

• The character that currently leads your decisions.
• The character that appears under pressure.
• The character that has served you in the past but may now limit you.
• The character you need to develop for your next chapter.

Your Seven Life Plots

Recognise the larger story structure shaping your current chapter.

You will explore seven fundamental plots:

1. Overcoming the monster.
2. Rags to riches.
3. The quest.
4. Voyage and return.
5. Comedy.
6. Tragedy.
7. Rebirth.

Rome is full of women’s stories that illustrate these dramatic structures.

Judith facing the tyrant and Cloelia escaping her captors are stories of overcoming the monster. Anna Magnani’s rise from a modest Roman childhood to the world’s screens is a story of rags to riches. Maria Montessori’s lifelong search for a better way to educate children is a quest. Anita Garibaldi’s journey from Brazil to the walls of Rome, and Queen Christina’s crossing of Europe, are voyages in which return was never an option. Roman Holiday is a comedy in which a princess steals a day of freedom and learns that freedom and duty can live together. Beatrice Cenci and Tosca are tragedies, women trapped by powers that offered them no good choices. And Artemisia Gentileschi, who rebuilt her life and reputation after a trial that tried to break her, is a story of rebirth.

You will name the plot you are living now and choose the plot you want to write next.

Your Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations

Understand conflict as the engine of growth rather than something to avoid.

Rome has been the stage for some of history’s most dramatic human conflicts: empire and republic, faith and power, love and betrayal, ambition and sacrifice, freedom and obedience, creativity and convention. Women in this city have often faced those conflicts without the protection of title, vote, or institution, and have shaped the outcome anyway.

You will identify the dramatic tension at the centre of your current challenge: ambition, rivalry, betrayal, sacrifice, pursuit, an impossible task, conflict with authority, or a decision that can no longer be delayed.

You will move from reactive patterns to conscious choice.

Your Two Possible Endings

Explore the difference between an ending created through avoidance, fear, or disconnection and an ending created through full engagement, meaningful action, and flow.

A flow-based ending does not mean the absence of difficulty. It means meeting difficulty with clear goals, focused attention, use of your strengths, and a sense of connection to something larger than yourself.

Rome offers a particularly inspiring perspective on this choice. Its history shows women who stopped waiting for permission: Teresa Gullace, who in 1944 walked up to a barracks to reach her husband and became a symbol of Roman courage; the women of the Constituent Assembly of 1946, who took their seats in the new republic’s first parliament; and Maria Montessori, who opened her first Casa dei Bambini in the San Lorenzo district in 1907 and refused to let the world’s doubts decide its future.

You will explore which ending you are currently creating and which ending you consciously want to choose.

Your One Great Journey

Finally, you will place your personal and professional challenge within a larger transformation: the heroine’s journey.

Rome has always attracted women prepared to leave familiar territory in pursuit of a different future. Queens arrived having given up thrones. Writers came from distant islands to find their audience. Scientists, painters, and reformers built their work in a city that offered both extraordinary ruins and extraordinary room to begin again.

You will identify the threshold you are crossing, the inner resources you need, the allies and obstacles around you, and the gift you intend to bring back to your organisation, clients, family, or community.

Your Personal Story Guide

Before the journey, you will receive What Story Are You Living Now? A Guide to Rome, the heroine’s edition.

This practical self-assessment helps you prepare by scoring statements related to:

• The twelve inner characters that shape your leadership and relationships.
• The seven plots that describe the larger shape of your current chapter.
• The thirty-six dramatic situations that reveal the conflict asking for your response.

Every statement is illustrated by a short story about a woman connected to Rome: a ruler, saint, artist, scientist, resister, performer, or fictional heroine from literature, opera, and film.

These stories are not simply cultural references. They are mirrors.

Through the lives and choices of women whose stories can be encountered in Rome, in museums, churches, ruins, books, films, music, and memory, you will recognise your own patterns, strengths, blind spots, and possibilities.

Your completed guide becomes the starting point for your coaching journey in Rome and the foundation of your five-year narrative blueprint.

The Five-Day Journey

Day One: Departure & The Ordinary World

The Power of Your Story

Begin on the Capitoline Hill with a private conversation about your professional context, ambitions, and central questions, with the Roman Forum spread out below you.

This is the ancient heart of the city, where the public life of Rome unfolded, and where women who were officially excluded from public life found ways to shape it anyway. Hortensia spoke here. Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, is remembered for pointing to her sons as her jewels. The Vestal Virgins, who tended Rome’s sacred fire from their house in the Forum, held a rare independence in the Roman world: they could own property and make their own wills.

Through the stories of Hortensia, Cornelia, Livia, the Vestals, and Frances of Rome, whose church stands at the edge of the Forum, you will examine the narrative you have been living and the future you want to create.

Walk the Forum and the Palatine Hill, where Livia lived beside Augustus, and reflect on the relationship between visible and invisible power, between the role you were given and the one you have chosen.

You will explore the voices that narrate your setbacks, successes, and identity. You will identify what your current story protects, what it costs, and what it makes possible.

Key reflection: What story am I living, and which parts have I never consciously chosen?

Outcome: Your personal energy story.

Day Two: The Call to Adventure & Internal Barriers

Your Twelve Inner Characters

Explore resistance: loyalty to past identities, the habit of being the dependable one, fear of unfamiliar territory, and the comfort of remaining competent at your current level.

Cross the Tiber into Trastevere, the neighbourhood of narrow lanes, ivy-covered walls, and old Roman life, long associated with the city’s fiercest independent spirit.

At Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, stand before Stefano Maderno’s famous statue of the martyr Cecilia, and consider the character who holds her ground. At Santa Maria in Trastevere, step into one of the oldest churches in Rome. At Palazzo Corsini, the former home of Queen Christina of Sweden, who died there in 1689, consider what it takes to leave a crown, a country, and a script behind. From the Janiculum Hill above, where the monument to Anita Garibaldi looks out over the city, see Rome the way she saw it as she fought to defend it.

Alongside them, you will encounter the Rome of Anna Magnani and Giulietta Masina’s Cabiria: the Orphan who learns to rely on herself, and the Innocent who keeps her heart open.

Through these lives, you will meet the inner characters that shape your leadership.

Consider the Seeker who leaves familiar territory, the Warrior who continues despite rejection and uncertainty, the Orphan who builds her own authority, and the Creator who refuses to follow established rules.

What happens when the character that made you successful becomes the character that limits your future?

You will identify the character that has brought you this far, the character that may now hold you back, and the character you need to develop next.

Key commitment: What am I ready to leave behind, and what am I choosing instead?

Outcome: Your inner leadership profile.

Day Three: The Ordeal & Reframing the Narrative

Your Plot, Conflict, and Chosen Ending

Move from diagnosis to transformation.

Identify the plot of your current chapter, the dramatic situation at its centre, and the ending you are creating through your choices.

Rome has been the stage for extraordinary struggles between authority and conscience, tradition and innovation, ambition and survival.

At Palazzo Barberini, stand before Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, and the portrait traditionally attributed to Guido Reni of Beatrice Cenci, a young woman whose story still divides opinion, and Raphael’s La Fornarina, the baker’s daughter from Trastevere. Consider Artemisia Gentileschi, who was born in Rome, trained in her father’s studio here, and, after a trial in which she maintained her testimony under pressure, went on to build one of the most successful careers of her age.

At Piazza Navona, visit the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, built over the traditional site of the martyrdom of the young Agnes. Then walk to the Ponte Sant’Angelo and Castel Sant’Angelo, where the history of Beatrice Cenci’s execution and the final scene of Puccini’s Tosca meet. Both are stories of women facing powers that offered them no easy choices, and both ask what it means to choose how a story ends.

Through stories of ambition, rivalry, loss, sacrifice, reinvention, and renewal, you will rewrite a limiting belief without denying facts, avoiding responsibility, or making promises you cannot sustain.

You will create a narrative that is both honest and empowering.

Key exercise: What conflict is asking me to grow, choose, or act, and what response would make me proud in five years?

Outcome: Your plot, conflict, and conscious ending plan.

Day Four: The Road Back & Behavioural Integration

From Insight to Leadership

Bridge reflection and execution.

In the quieter surroundings of the Villa Borghese gardens, the Pincio terrace, and the beautiful historic streets around the Spanish Steps, translate your insights into practical leadership behaviour.

The Pincio offers one of the great views of Rome, with the domes and rooftops laid out below, a fitting place for reflection on perspective, balance, and the relationship between personal ambition and the wider world. Nearby, the Spanish Steps and the streets below them belong to Princess Ann of Roman Holiday, who escapes her duties for a single unforgettable day and returns to her role changed. Consider what the return to your own life will require of you.

Test your revised narrative against your calendar, relationships, team dynamics, strategic priorities, and operational demands.

You will design a practical 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day implementation plan.

You will define the decisions, boundaries, conversations, and visible behaviours that will make your new story real.

Key reflection: If I genuinely lived this story, what would I decide, stop doing, and begin doing tomorrow?

Outcome: Your leadership and coaching implementation roadmap.

Day Five: Return with the Gift & Legacy

The One Great Story

Bring every element together.

See your challenge not as an isolated problem, but as one stage in a larger journey of growth, contribution, and transformation.

Begin at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where Catherine of Siena, patron saint of Italy, is buried beneath the high altar, and at the nearby Pantheon, an ancient building that has been repurposed and renewed for nearly two thousand years. Then walk to Piazza di Montecitorio, home of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, where the Constituent Assembly of 1946 met, and where twenty-one women, the madri costituenti, helped write the constitution of a new republic.

Through the stories of women who transformed difficulty into meaning, you will gain perspective on the road behind you and the road ahead.

Reflect on the courage of Catherine of Siena, the vision of Maria Montessori, the resilience of Artemisia Gentileschi, the inner freedom of Queen Christina, and the scientific persistence of Rita Levi-Montalcini.

What does it mean to leave something meaningful behind? What do you want people to remember about your leadership, your work, and the way you lived?

Rehearse a high-stakes conversation, receive feedback, and commit to the next chapter of your story.

The journey closes with a private celebration dinner on a terrace overlooking the domes and rooftops of Rome.

Final question: If my life is one great story, what challenge am I being called to meet, and what gift will I bring back when I return?

Outcome: Your five-year heroine’s journey blueprint.

What You Take Home

• A finalised five-year narrative blueprint for your personal and professional next chapter.
• The story-editing methodology to audit assumptions and reframe limiting narratives under pressure.
• Your inner character map to understand the roles that shape your decisions and leadership.
• Your plot and conflict map to identify the story structure and dramatic tension of your current chapter.
• Your flow-based ending plan to replace avoidance and drift with conscious engagement.
• A 90-day implementation roadmap with behavioural commitments, milestones, and accountability.
• The leadership and coaching toolkit with practical questions and exercises for high-stakes conversations.
• A certificate of completion for the five-day executive programme.

Practical Details

Detail	Description
Location	Rome, Italy
Duration	Five full days
Facilitator	Peter de Kuster
Format	Exclusive private group, up to four participants
Dates	Scheduled by arrangement
Language	English
Closing	Private celebration dinner overlooking the rooftops of Rome

Investment

€3,450 per participant · Excluding VAT

Private group booking, designed for small leadership teams or handpicked groups of up to four participants.

Included in your investment:

• All personal coaching and facilitation across five days.
• Private transport between curated Rome locations.
• Scheduled museum and site admissions.
• Gourmet lunches and daily refreshments.
• Closing celebration dinner.
• Complete narrative, coaching, and implementation toolkit.
• What Story Are You Living Now? A Guide to Rome.

Ready to Author Your Next Chapter?

Rome has always been a city where women come to change their story.

It is a city of empresses and saints, painters and scientists, performers and reformers. A place where old orders have fallen, new ones have risen, and extraordinary transformations have taken place, often with women at the centre.

Through the lives, films, opera, literature, art, architecture, and music found in Rome, you will discover mirrors for your own journey: stories of courage, creativity, ambition, love, loss, reinvention, and legacy.

Join a small, private group of leaders and coaches for five days of reflection, conversation, cultural discovery, and practical transformation.

Rewrite your story. Transform your life and business.

Contact us to arrange your private group dates and tailor your five-day journey through Rome.

The Heroine’s Journey: Rome, a journey through the stories of the women of an eternal city, and an opportunity to write the story that will shape your future.