New Adventures for 2010: Vegetarian Half Term | Taste + Textiles | A Tuscan Autumn Adventure

Other personalized packages: Cheese + Honey | Pork + Porcini | Olive Oil, Chestnuts + Polenta |
Gastronomic Adventures for Familes | Bare Oil in Tuscany | Cooking Lessons and Courses

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
  

• 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.