Saints & Super Sunday
In the story of three ethnic groups lies the story of America.
A New Orleans Cultural Tour | March 16–22, 2027
Co-Produced by Project Por Amor and the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans
Please note that some activities of this itinerary are still in planning with the local communities. There may be slight modifications to our schedule between now and our travel.
This tour is a weeklong seminar disguised as a celebration — a focused exploration of three communities whose labor, faith, food, and music built the Crescent City: the Irish, the Sicilians, and the Black Masking Indians. Their stories are interconnected in ways that only reveal themselves on the ground — in the architecture of a corner grocery, the geography of a cemetery, the route of a parade.
And we’ve chosen the one week of the year when all three communities step into the streets. Between March 16 and 22, 2027, St. Patrick’s Day, St. Joseph’s Day, and Super Sunday converge — making this one of the most vibrant weeks in New Orleans for locals, and one of the least understood by outsiders. We’ll be on the inside: welcomed by museum founders and Big Chiefs, fed in family restaurants and living rooms, guided by the city’s leading historians, geographers, musicians, and culture bearers.
DAY 1: TUESDAY, MARCH 16 | WELCOME TO THE CRESCENT CITY
Meet at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport
Upon arrival at New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport, collect your luggage and proceed to the bottom of the baggage claim escalators, where our local guide and U.S.-based tour leader will be waiting to greet you. Depending on flight schedules, travelers will be grouped by arrival and escorted to private transportation for the transfer to the Hotel Monteleone, where our New Orleans adventure begins.
Image caption: Louis Armstrong New Orleans Airport
Check into the Hotel Monteleone
Our home for the week is itself a chapter in the story we’ve come to learn. The Hotel Monteleone — a grand historic landmark in the heart of the French Quarter — was founded in 1886 by Antonio Monteleone, a Sicilian shoemaker who arrived with a dream and built a dynasty. Five generations later, his family still owns and operates this beloved institution, making it one of the last great family-run hotels in America and a living monument to the Sicilian immigrant story at the center of our tour. Settle into its old-world elegance, take a slow spin at the iconic revolving Carousel Bar, and enjoy the rooftop pool and spa. Literary royalty — Faulkner, Hemingway, Capote, Welty — drank, wrote, and dreamed here. This week, so will you.
Image caption: The Hotel Monteleone and its famous Carousel Bar
6:30 pm ~ Welcome Reception at Sunset & Private Dinner with Live Jazz at the Riverview Room
We begin at the top. Ride up to the Riverview Room, perched above the Hotel Monteleone with sweeping panoramic views of the French Quarter rooftops and the crescent bend of the Mississippi River that gave this city its nickname. As the sun sets over the water, raise a glass with your fellow travelers and meet the team who will guide your week. Then settle in for a private Creole dinner as a New Orleans-style jazz duo plays — the city’s signature sound welcoming you from your very first evening, with its greatest river rolling past below.
Image caption: Sunset welcome reception and private dinner at the Riverview Room
DAY 2: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17 | ST. PATRICK’S DAY
Breakfast at our Hotel
Each morning, enjoy a freshly prepared breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone, included with your stay — the perfect fuel for the day’s discoveries before stepping out into the French Quarter.
Image caption: Breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone
10:00 am ~ French Quarter Walking Tour with Russell Blanchard
Lace up your walking shoes for a morning exploration of the French Quarter with Russell Blanchard — a ninth-generation Cajun descendant, licensed New Orleans tour guide, and manager of the Preservation Resource Center’s Tour Program, who brings a filmmaker’s eye for story honed over twenty years working on major film projects around the globe. We begin inside the Cabildo, the historic seat of Spanish colonial government on Jackson Square, for an introduction with the staff. From there, the Quarter unfolds block by block — and the first revelation is that the “French” Quarter is hardly French at all: after the great fires of 1788 and 1794 destroyed the original colonial town, it was the Spanish who rebuilt it, giving us the courtyards, arched carriageways, and wrought-iron galleries we see today. A century later, the Sicilian migration filled these same blocks so completely that the neighborhood became known as Little Palermo, or the Sicilian Quarter.
Image caption: French Quarter walking tour with Russell Blanchard
11:00 am ~ Treasures from the Vault at The Historic New Orleans Collection
At The Historic New Orleans Collection, one of the nation’s premier archives of Gulf South history, a historian will bring rarely seen treasures out of the vault just for our group — documents, photographs, maps, and artifacts that tell the stories of the Irish, Sicilian, and Black Masking Indian communities in forming the New Orleans culture of today. You’ll see the evidence of the Quarter’s own transformation, from the Spanish colonial city that rose after the great fires to the bustling Little Palermo of the Sicilian immigrants who lived and worked on these very blocks.
Image caption: Private show & tell at The Historic New Orleans Collection
12:30 pm ~ Lunch at Tableau’s Parlor Room
Lunch today is in the elegant Parlor Room at Tableau, overlooking Jackson Square from one of the Quarter’s most beautiful historic buildings. The menu is classic New Orleans: sherry-laced turtle soup or duck and andouille gumbo to start, followed by pasta jambalaya or chicken Pontalba, and finished with tarte à la bouillie — a rustic Cajun sweet-dough custard tart with old New Orleans rum caramel — or a salted chocolate ganache torte. Fortification for a festive afternoon.
Image caption: Lunch in the Parlor Room at Tableau
2:00 pm ~ St. Louis Cathedral Tour with Executive Director Chris Wiseman
Also known as the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France, and dating to 1720, St. Louis Cathedral is the oldest Catholic cathedral in continuous use in the United States — and the spiritual anchor of every community in our story. Chris Wiseman, Executive Director of the Catholic Cultural Center of New Orleans, leads us through its striking architecture and storied history, including an in-depth look at the cathedral’s recent revitalization spearheaded by Gayle Benson — active parishioner, major philanthropist, and owner of the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans. For the Irish and Sicilians, this building was the center of the world.
Image caption: Private tour of St. Louis Cathedral with Chris Wiseman
4:00 pm ~ St. Patrick’s Day at The Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans
There’s no better place to spend the late afternoon of March 17th. At the Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans, a small, multi-generational, family-owned gem in the French Quarter, the owner himself will pour Irish drinks from the bar while sharing his perspective on the history and present life of Irish New Orleans — a community that dug the New Basin Canal at staggering human cost, filled the Irish Channel with shotgun houses and parish churches, and gave the city much of its accent, humor, and grit. Then an Irish fiddler, joined by piano and vocals, fills the room with Celtic music. Open bar and open hearts — St. Patrick’s Day at its very best.
Image caption: St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the Irish Cultural Museum
5:30 pm ~ Evening on Your Own in the French Quarter
Enjoy free time to explore the Quarter at your own pace on its most spirited night of the year. Stroll the historic streets, browse galleries and shops, and follow the live music drifting from corners and clubs. Treat yourself to a beignet and café au lait at Café du Monde. For dinner, the Quarter’s options are endless — we recommend GW Fins, Arnaud’s, Sylvain, or Bayona — and for a nightcap with music, try the 21st Amendment, the Davenport Lounge, or the clubs of Frenchmen Street. We’ll point you toward our favorites.
Image caption: Evening at leisure in the French Quarter
DAY 3: THURSDAY, MARCH 18 | READING THE CITY
Breakfast at our Hotel
Each morning, enjoy a freshly prepared breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone, included with your stay.
Image caption: Breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone
10:00 am ~ Welcome to the Preservation Resource Center with Executive Director Kristin Palmer
At the Preservation Resource Center’s headquarters in the historic Leeds-Davis Building, Executive Director (and former City Councilwoman) Kristin Palmer introduces the preeminent nonprofit dedicated to preserving New Orleans’ historic architecture, neighborhoods, and culture — our partner in producing this tour. For over fifty years, the PRC has prevented countless demolitions, championed protective legislation, and empowered communities to save the streetscapes that make this city irreplaceable. Understanding their work is the key to understanding everything you’ll see this week.
Image caption: Visit to the Preservation Resource Center
10:30 am ~ Ethnic & Racial Settlement Patterns of New Orleans with Dr. Richard Campanella
Few American cities reveal the relationship between geography and social hierarchy as plainly as New Orleans — if you know how to read the map. In this presentation, Dr. Richard Campanella, author and Associate Dean for Research at the Tulane University School of Architecture, examines how the city’s distinctive tripartite racial society — white Creoles, free people of color, and enslaved Africans — arranged itself across the urban landscape from the colonial era forward, and how those patterns were reinforced, disrupted, and reconfigured by emancipation, migration, urban renewal, and catastrophe. The natural levee, the backswamp, the invisible boundary of a neutral ground: these are not incidental features but structuring forces that shaped where different ethnic and racial communities settled, worshipped, buried their dead, and built their institutions. Campanella draws on census records, Sanborn maps, and his own longitudinal spatial analysis to show how settlement geographies established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries echo — sometimes eerily — into the twenty-first. This is the story of how power, place, and identity intertwine in a city that has always been, at once, one of America’s most integrated and most divided.
Image caption: Presentation by historical geographer Richard Campanella
12:15 pm ~ Private Lunch at Cochon Butcher with Live Opera
The muffuletta is Sicilian New Orleans in sandwich form — cured meats, cheese, and olive salad layered on round seeded bread, invented by Sicilian grocers a century ago and now a staple of the local table. Today we eat one of the city’s very best at Cochon Butcher, the acclaimed artisan butcher shop and sandwich counter from chefs Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski — accompanied, in true New Orleans fashion, by live Italian opera. It’s a fitting pairing: in the nineteenth century, this was America’s first great opera city, and its Sicilian community helped keep that tradition singing.
Image caption: Muffulettas and live opera at Cochon Butcher
2:00 pm ~ Tremé Walking Tour & Congo Square with Malik Bartholomew
Historian, photographer, researcher, storyteller, and radio host Malik Bartholomew leads us on a 90-minute walking tour of Tremé — the oldest African-American neighborhood in the United States and the birthplace of jazz. Through its architecture, music, civil rights landmarks, and Black Masking Indian culture, the neighborhood tells the story of Black New Orleans across three centuries. We end in Congo Square, where enslaved and free people of African descent gathered on Sundays to drum, dance, trade, and worship — sustaining the rhythms that would become jazz — and visit the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, a deeply moving memorial to the lives on which this city was built.
Image caption: Tremé walking tour with Malik Bartholomew, ending at Congo Square
4:00 pm ~ Downtime Before Dinner
Return to the Monteleone for a moment to freshen up, take a swim, or simply rest before the evening ahead.
5:00 pm ~ St. Joseph’s Altar Viewing & Feast at Irene’s
Tonight, we begin our immersion in one of New Orleans’ most beautiful traditions. At Irene’s, the beloved family-run Sicilian-Creole restaurant in the French Quarter, we’ll view their extraordinary St. Joseph’s Altar — a towering, fragrant offering of breads, pastries, citrus, fava beans, and flowers built in gratitude to the saint who, legend holds, ended a famine in medieval Sicily — complete with a blessing and seminarian chant. Then we sit down to Irene’s St. Joseph’s feast, where Sicilian soul and Creole technique meet in one of the city’s most cherished dining rooms.
Image caption: St. Joseph’s Altar viewing and feast at Irene’s
7:30 pm ~ Suggested Live Music
We’ll accompany you to our suggested concerts of the evening at our favorite venues — Chickie Wah Wah, the Davenport Lounge, the Maple Leaf Bar, Vaughan’s Lounge, the Bayou Bar, Snug Harbor, and many others.
Image caption: Optional live music at the city’s great venues
DAY 4: FRIDAY, MARCH 19 | ST. JOSEPH’S DAY & ST. JOSEPH’S NIGHT
Breakfast at our Hotel
Each morning, enjoy a freshly prepared breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone, included with your stay.
Image caption: Breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone
10:00 am ~ Visit to the American Italian Cultural Center
We begin St. Joseph’s Day at its source: the American Italian Cultural Center, keeper of the story of one of the largest Sicilian migrations in American history. Between 1880 and 1910, tens of thousands of Sicilians sailed directly from Palermo to New Orleans, filling the lower French Quarter so densely it became known as “Little Palermo.” They worked the docks and the sugar fields, opened corner groceries and produce stands, endured prejudice and worse — including the infamous 1891 lynching, the largest in American history — and ultimately wove themselves into the very fabric of the city, from its restaurants to its grandest hotel, our own Monteleone.
Image caption: Visit to the American Italian Cultural Center
11:00 am ~ St. Joseph’s Day Altars at the Churches
On March 19th, more than fifty Catholic churches and homes across New Orleans unveil elaborate St. Joseph’s Altars — a devotional tradition carried from Sicily and kept gloriously alive here for over a century. Tables rise in tiers of braided breads, fig-stuffed cuccidati cookies, citrus, wine, candles, and lilies, all blessed and then given away to those in need. We’ll visit two of the city’s finest, at St. Joseph Church — one of the largest churches in the South — and St. Francis Xavier, meeting the parishioners who spend weeks building these edible monuments to gratitude, abundance, and charity.
Image caption: St. Joseph’s Day Altars
12:00 pm ~ Private Lunch at Dooky Chase with Artist Ron Bechet
We’ll have lunch on the second floor of Dooky Chase’s, the iconic Tremé restaurant where the late, legendary Leah Chase — the Queen of Creole Cuisine — fed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and the strategists of the Civil Rights Movement in an upstairs room when planning meetings between Black and white organizers were illegal downstairs. Surrounded by the Chase family’s remarkable collection of African-American art, we’re joined by celebrated painter and Xavier University professor Ron Bechet, who will speak about his work and the deep creative traditions of Black New Orleans — over gumbo, fried chicken, and history you can taste.
Image caption: Lunch and artist talk with Ron Bechet at Dooky Chase’s
2:00 pm ~ Tremé’s Petit Jazz Museum
At the intimate Tremé’s Petit Jazz Museum, a curated, guided audiovisual presentation shares the rich global story of jazz — beginning with its African roots and tracing its journey through the Caribbean to its birthplace in the surrounding blocks of Tremé. Through the cultural migrations, rhythms, and voices that gave rise to this world-changing art form, the museum honors the legacy of Black creativity and connects communities through the power of music, memory, and movement.
Image caption: Visit to Tremé’s Petit Jazz Museum
3:30 pm ~ Time at Leisure
Return to the Monteleone to recharge your batteries — a nap, a swim, a slow turn at the Carousel Bar — or explore the city on your own. You’ll want your energy tonight.
6:00 pm ~ Walk with Shaka Zulu’s Golden Feather Hunters on St. Joseph’s Night
Then comes one of the rarest invitations in American culture. On St. Joseph’s Night — one of only a few nights each year when the Black Masking Indians appear in full regalia — we are invited to walk with Big Chief Shaka Zulu and the Golden Feather Hunters as they take to the streets. Born from a profound bond between enslaved Africans and the Native Americans who sheltered them, this tradition has been passed down for well over a century: each year, members sew dazzling new suits of beads, feathers, and rhinestones — thousands of hours of handwork — and parade them through the neighborhoods with chants, tambourines, and ritual encounters between tribes. This is not a performance staged for visitors. It is a living ceremony, and we walk inside it as guests.
Image caption: St. Joseph’s Night with the Golden Feather Hunters
8:00 pm ~ St. Joseph’s Block Party on Bourbon Street
The night crescendos at a private St. Joseph’s block party on Bourbon Street, where opera singers perform from the historic balconies above while the celebration fills the street below — a scene out of nineteenth-century New Orleans, when Italian arias and street festivity were both part of the city’s everyday soundtrack. Afterward, a late dinner and more live music await for those still going strong; we’ll share our recommendations.
Image caption: St. Joseph’s Block Party with opera from the balconies of Bourbon Street
DAY 5: SATURDAY, MARCH 20 | RIVER ROAD & THE WHITNEY
Breakfast at our Hotel
Each morning, enjoy a freshly prepared breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone, included with your stay.
Image caption: Breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone
9:30 am ~ Drive up Historic River Road
Embark on one of America’s most culturally significant drives as we follow the legendary River Road along the meandering curves of the mighty Mississippi. This historic 45-mile corridor traces the same route nineteenth-century steamboat passengers admired from the water — through a landscape that once held such a staggering concentration of wealth that a third of America’s millionaires lived along it in the 1850s. Today, the drive reveals Louisiana’s complex layers: live oak alleys draped in Spanish moss; framing surviving antebellum mansions, sugarcane fields stretching toward cypress swamps; and the petrochemical plants that now occupy land once devoted to plantation agriculture, now giving it the name “Cancer Alley.” Your guide will help you read this evolving landscape — a moving classroom that prepares you for what awaits at the Whitney.
Image caption: Drive up historic River Road
10:30 am ~ Private Tour of Whitney Plantation with Founding Director Dr. Ibrahima Seck
The Whitney Plantation is the only plantation museum in Louisiana dedicated to telling the story of slavery through the eyes of those who were enslaved here — and we experience it with Dr. Ibrahima Seck, the Senegalese historian who serves as its founding director of research and wrote the definitive history of this ground. Walk the historic site with him: the Big House and the slave cabins, the memorial walls engraved with thousands of names, the haunting statues of children whose first-person testimonies guide the visit. Through art, artifacts, and narrative, the Whitney offers a moving and essential perspective on the foundation upon which everything else we’ve seen this week was built — including the labor that Irish and Sicilian immigrants were later recruited to perform on these same lands.
Image caption: Private tour of Whitney Plantation with Dr. Ibrahima Seck
1:00 pm ~ Cajun Lunch & Private Band at B&C Seafood
We stop for lunch at B&C Seafood Riverside Market & Cajun Restaurant, a family-owned gem on the river known for fresh local seafood and classic Cajun cooking. Savor fried catfish, gumbo, or crawfish étouffée in a relaxed market-style setting while a private Cajun band performs just for us — an authentic taste of rural Louisiana to balance the morning’s gravity with the music and hospitality that carry this region through everything.
Image caption: Cajun lunch and live band at B&C Seafood
3:00 pm ~ “They Call Me Chief”: Talk & Performance on the Black Masking Indians with Dr. Kim Vaz-Deville
On the eve of Super Sunday, we sit down with one of the foremost scholars of the masking traditions we’re about to witness. Dr. Kim Vaz-Deville — professor at Xavier University of Louisiana and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow — has spent her career documenting the Black masking cultures of New Orleans, from the Mardi Gras Indians to the Baby Dolls, whose history she recovered in her acclaimed books. In a talk woven together with live performance, she illuminates the meanings sewn into every suit: the spiritual bond between enslaved Africans and Native Americans, the resistance encoded in beadwork and chant, and the matriarchs and Big Chiefs who have carried this art form through segregation, displacement, and storm. You walked beside the feathers on St. Joseph’s Night; before tomorrow’s Super Sunday, you’ll learn the language they speak.
Image caption: Talk and performance on Black Masking Indian culture with Dr. Kim Vaz-Deville
Late Afternoon & Evening ~ Time at Leisure
We return to the hotel by late afternoon, and the rest of the evening is yours. Rest at the Monteleone, browse the antique shops and galleries of Royal Street, or catch the golden hour along the riverfront. Dinner is on your own this evening — we’ll share our favorite restaurant and live-music recommendations, and our guide is always glad to point you toward exactly the kind of evening you’re craving.
Image caption: Evening at leisure in the French Quarter
DAY 6: SUNDAY, MARCH 21 | SUPER SUNDAY
Breakfast at our Hotel
Each morning, enjoy a freshly prepared breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone, included with your stay.
Image caption: Breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone
10:00 am ~ Private Tour of St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 with Save Our Cemeteries
Step into New Orleans’ past with a guided tour of historic St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, led by Save Our Cemeteries, a department of the Preservation Resource Center. On stately Esplanade Avenue near Bayou St. John, this beautiful Catholic cemetery is one of the city’s finest places to explore the distinctive above-ground tombs, intricate sculptures, and private family vaults that reflect centuries of culture, faith, and tradition — including the society tombs where Irish, Sicilian, and Black benevolent associations buried their members with dignity when no one else would. Along the way, learn about jazz funerals, why the dead are buried above ground, and the captivating stories of the soldiers, musicians, and even Storyville madams who rest in these iconic “Cities of the Dead.”
Image caption: Private cemetery tour with Save Our Cemeteries
12:00 pm ~ Living Room Concert & Lunch at the Home of Leroy Jones
Trumpeter Leroy Jones — hailed as a modern master of the New Orleans jazz tradition and a longtime leader at Preservation Hall — welcomes us into his own Tremé home, where he’s cooked a red beans and rice lunch buffet (it’s almost Monday, after all) and will perform for us right in his living room. Pull up a chair, fill your plate, and let one of the city’s greatest horns play just feet away. This is the hospitality, intimacy, and musical generosity that no concert hall can replicate.
Image caption: Living room concert and red beans lunch with Leroy Jones
2:00 pm ~ Dusky Waters: “Shared Roots — Race, Radio & the Story of Country Music”
Inside, singer-songwriter Dusky Waters presents a private concert and presentation tracing how country and Americana music grew from shared Black and white roots — and how the recording industry’s fabricated categories of “hillbilly” and “race” records divided those traditions into boxes defined by race. Through live performances of songs by Linda Martell, Elizabeth Cotten, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, placed in historical context, we hear how artists navigated the industry’s racial boundaries, and how streaming algorithms continue these patterns today.
Image caption: Super Sunday and a private Dusky Waters concert at the historic Dew Drop Inn
3:00 pm ~ Super Sunday Headquarters at the Historic Dew Drop Inn
For the grand finale of our week, we take over one of the most storied music venues in America. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the Dew Drop Inn was the epicenter of Black entertainment in the South — Ray Charles, Little Richard, Allen Toussaint, and Irma Thomas all played its stage — and it has now been gloriously restored as a hotel and live music club. Today it becomes our private headquarters for Super Sunday, the biggest day of the year for the Black Masking Indians, when dozens of tribes parade Uptown in their newest suits — and the route passes right by our door. Step outside to the spectacle of feathers, drums, and chants, then return to comfort, refreshments, and the best seat in the city.
4:30 pm ~ Time at Leisure
Return to the Monteleone to rest and dress for our farewell evening.
7:00 pm ~ Farewell Dinner at Brennan’s
We gather one last time at Brennan’s, the beloved French Quarter institution renowned for its elegant Creole cuisine and festive dining rooms. Brennan’s has been delighting guests since 1946, specializing in Gulf seafood and classic New Orleans dishes — and tonight’s menu honors them all: turtle soup or seafood filé gumbo to start, braised short rib or blackened Gulf fish to follow, and for the finish, New Orleans bread pudding or the legendary Bananas Foster, created right here at Brennan’s and flambéed tableside. Founded by an Irish-American family that became Creole culinary royalty, it’s a fitting final chapter to our story — and the perfect closure to the flavors, charm, and hospitality of New Orleans. Raise a glass to the saints, the chiefs, the cooks, and the culture keepers who shared their city with us this week.
Image caption: Farewell dinner and Bananas Foster at Brennan’s
DAY 7: MONDAY, MARCH 22 | DEPARTURE
Final Breakfast at the Hotel
Enjoy a freshly prepared breakfast at the hotel, served from 7:00–11:00 am.
Image caption: Breakfast at the Hotel Monteleone
Check out of Hotel & Transfer to MSY Airport
We’ll say our goodbyes and shuttle everyone to Louis Armstrong International Airport according to departure times — sending you home with a deeper understanding of a singular American city, and of the three communities whose saints, suits, and Sunday celebrations made it sing.
Image caption: Departure transfers to the airport