Cheese + Honey | Pork + Porcini | Olive Oil, Chestnuts + Polenta | Gastronomic Adventures for Familes
Bare Oil in Tuscany | Slow Food Salone del Gusto + Lucca | Cooking Lessons and Courses

Packaged adventures:
Cheese + Honey

Sunday 18–Saturday 24 May 2008 (CH08/1)
Sunday 25–Saturday 31 May 2008 (CH08/2)

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. Activities include:

• Dinner and cheese-tasting comparing British and Italian sheep’s milk cheeses hosted by Slow Food Lucca and presented by Neal’s Yard Dairy (London)
• Make your own farmer’s cheese
• Visit Signora Gonella 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 vegetables and herbs with Lucchese chef Gianluca Pardini
• 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
  

• Visit the mediaeval walled town of Barga, its duomo and 17th-century baroque theatre
• Guided tour of the Villa Torrigiani, a feast of baroque loggias, stairways, and statues
• Walk in the early summer woods full of flowering acacia and wildflowers
• Watch Armando Scaramucci and his wife process acacia honey and sample the intense and varied flavours of honey produced on the Forci estate
• 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 Volpi, Mastiano (Lucca, Tuscany)
An elegantly restored, 18th-century, traditional farmhouse with 4* amenities including en-suite bathrooms, air-conditioning/central heating, swimming pool. Some events take place at the adjacent Villa Volpi restaurant which is run by Piero Morelli, leader of the Serchio di Lucca Slow Food Convivium.

Price: €2150
Single supplement: €190

Notes

More details of the programme will be sent nearer the time. Weather is usually warm and dry. Bring a swimsuit and walking shoes or boots.

Meeting points
Pisa International Airport (Galileo Galilei)
or the following train stations:
Pisa Centrale
Lucca
Ponte a Moriano

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.