To read Heather’s NEW online blog, please: click here.
| |
Personalized packages:
Cheese + Honey
Last week in May to end of July
Early summer, full of promise — the milk is perfect for cheesemaking and the creamy drooping acacia flowers attract the bees. Spend seven illuminating days exploring the mysteries of cheese: tasting it, making it, visiting cheesemakers and cooking with it. Stroll in wildflower meadows and acacia woods, and discover the variety and intensity of the pure flavours of single-flower honey. By July the chestnuts have flowered and the bees are busy producing chestnut honey. Activities include:
- Visit a shepherd and watch her make pecorino and ricotta with milk from her own flocks
- Visit the small family-owned Caseificio Bertagni (dairy) where tradition and modernity meet
- Learn to cook local dishes based on cheese and spring or summer vegetables and herbs with real Italian mammas
- Join the locals at a village festival
- Cheese, salumi and wine tasting at Andrea Bertucci’s parallel gastronomic universe, the Osteria ‘Il Vecchio Mulino’, beneath the 12th-century fortress in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana

Visiting Caseificio Bertagni |

Processing honey |

Stirring stuff |

Visiting a baroque garden |
- Visit the mediaeval walled town of Barga, its duomo and 17th-century baroque theatre
- Guided tour of one of the grand villas and its gardens near Lucca
- Walk in the summer woods
- Watch a beekeeper process honey and sample the intense and varied flavours of honey produced
- Free day in the walled town of Lucca for sightseeing and shopping, or rent a bicycle and tour the tops of the 17th-century walls
- Tour sculpture studio beneath famous Carrara marble quarries
- Grand finale: dinner at Michelin-starred restaurant La Mora
- Optional concert or other cultural event
Accommodation
Hotel, villa or agriturismo (self-catering unit on a farm)
Notes
Meeting points
Pisa International Airport (Galileo Galilei)
or the following train stations:
Pisa Centrale
Lucca
International travel advice
For more information on flights to Pisa International Airport, please click here. For information on arriving by train The Man in Seat Sixty-One gives much good advice.
|
|
| |
Site design: Duncan Designs · Last updated: 31 January 2010 ·
Photo Credits: Marion Edwards, O’Connor, Duncan Fielden, Andrew Houston and many of our adventurers, to all of whom we are very grateful.