Stollen, Spice & Story: A Soulful Christmas Markets Journey
There are journeys you take, and there are journeys that take you. This is the second kind.
Stollen, Spice & Story is a 9-day luxury group journey sailing the Rhine River from Basel to Amsterdam aboard the elegant AmaVenita, part of AmaWaterways' celebrated Soulful Experience collection — an itinerary curated to honor Black heritage and the African diaspora alongside the magic of the European Christmas markets. This is the inaugural Tack and Table signature journey, and it was built to be remembered.
The journey begins in Lake Como, Italy, where three nights among Alpine lakes and silk-draped villages ease you into the rhythm of European winter before the river calls. From there, Basel welcomes you aboard with its Roman ruins, Picasso-donated masterpieces, and Switzerland's finest Christmas market glowing beneath a red sandstone cathedral. The AmaVenita then sails north through a week of ports that carry the full weight of European history, Black cultural survival, and culinary depth that most travelers never find.
In Breisach, you cross into Alsace wine country and the fairy-tale village of Riquewihr, unchanged since 1500. In Strasbourg — the Capital of Christmas — you wander La Petite France, the oldest Christmas market in France, and then enter the Château Musée Vodou, home to the largest collection of West African Vodou objects in the world. Over 1,200 sacred pieces from Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria, housed in a 17th-century water tower on the French-German border. This is not a curiosity. It is a homecoming.
In Heidelberg, the perfectly preserved medieval city along Germany's Castle Road, you tour the red sandstone castle and its legendary Great Vat — a 49,000-gallon wine cask that has stood since the 18th century. In Rüdesheim, lantern-lit cobblestones and open-air wine gardens welcome you into the Drosselgasse as choirs drift from the village churches. Then the AmaVenita glides into the UNESCO Rhine Gorge — 65 kilometers of the most castle-dense landscape in the world, more than 40 fortresses rising from the hillsides above the water as the Lorelei Rock passes in silence.
Cologne brings the jazz. Papa Joe's Jazzlokal, Germany's oldest jazz club, has hosted live Dixieland and New Orleans swing every single day since 1974 — nearly 17,000 concerts. Jazz is an African American art form that traveled to Europe and took root here. You will hear it in the room where it lives. The Cathedral overhead, six Christmas markets at your feet, and the music of the diaspora filling the Altstadt on a December evening.
Aboard the AmaVenita throughout the voyage, evenings come alive with Kinara candle-lighting ceremonies and daily Kwanzaa reflections on the seven principles — Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba, Imani. The culinary thread running through every dinner carries the James Beard Award-winning signature of Alexander Smalls, whose curated menu is woven into every AmaWaterways Soulful Experience departure. This is not background programming. It is the heart of the ship.
The voyage concludes in Amsterdam, and then Tack and Table extends it further. Two additional nights bring the Black Heritage Amsterdam Tour with cultural historian Jennifer Tosch — the most rigorous reclamation of African diaspora history in the Netherlands, recognized by the Dutch government itself. The Black Archives. The Rijksmuseum's permanent slavery exhibition, the first of its kind in a major Dutch national museum. The canal ring lit for the holidays. And on Christmas Day, the table everyone came for: a private West African Christmas Dinner at Restaurant Kenneh, where Chef Samuka Kenneh — trained in Michelin-starred kitchens and rooted in the traditions of Sierra Leone — sets a feast that brings the entire journey home.
You fly on December 24. Rested. Full. Changed.