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: Gastronomic Adventures for Families

When did your children last cook dinner for you? In my village in the Garfagnana, the youngsters prepare a wood-oven baked pizza dinner for the whole village. My 11-year-old student of English begs to be let off her lesson early to go home and help make necci, traditional chestnut-flour crêpes, with her grandmother. Last autumn she had helped collect the chestnuts and take them to the nearby chestnut-drying hut. She visited the organic water mill where they were ground, and she knows her chestnut flour won a national gold medal this year.

In Italy families still cook and eat together with conviviality and affection. You and your children can experience these intangible pleasures while staying in a small village or on a smallholding and mixing with the locals. Share the locals’ delight in food in all its aspects — growing it, processing it, cooking it, tasting it and eating it along with the local wine and beer.

There are loads of different activities at different seasons that can be enjoyed by the ‘young at heart’ of any age. Here’s a sample:

• Cooking lessons with young Italian mammas — learn to make pasta by hand and lots of other traditional dishes that are easy to make with your children at home with the bonus of a healthy meal to enjoy with friends and family.
• Develop the confidence to improvise without a recipe using the ingredients you have to hand.
• Swim.
• Pick wild bilberries (blueberries) and make jam in July. Pick olives and make olive oil in October.
• Watch Renato make sausages and then BBQ them for dinner.
• Paint the mountain scenery, the wildflowers, the sunset.
• Mingle with Italian families at one of the many village festivals celebrating the food that makes them unique, for example, a type of crêpe made only in one village in the mountains or rosticciana and fagioli (the Garfagnana version of pork ribs and beans).
• Ride horses.
• Children organize a blind wine-tasting for their parents.
• Visit a beekeeper and watch her extract honey from the honeycomb — don’t worry, the bees stay at home in the hive — and taste the different flavours of honey, such as acacia, wildflower and chestnut, on cheese and locally baked bread.
• Walk in the woods to see the Cinta Senese pigs and piglets.
• Put on a concert (we’ll find out if anyone plays an instrument and suggest they bring it).
• Get off the ground in a woodland adventure park for children and adults (suspension bridges, rope ladders, and other exciting pathways connecting the tree trunks) and eat a picnic ‘tasting’ lunch of delicious local products.
• Get milk from the ‘mechanical cow’, a refrigerator that lives in a wooden hut and gives unpasteurized milk when you press the button. A local dairy farmer fills her up twice a day.
• Keep a journal — in words or pictures — so you can share your adventures with your friends at home.
• GOLDEN RULE:
  Taste everything — you might be surprised how good it is…!
  …but you don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it!

When asked what she enjoyed most, one 6-year-old said it was going to the spring to get fresh cold water for the dinner table. Pleasures can be that simple. A 9-year-old and her dad went straight home and made handmade pasta (with a rolling pin, not a pasta machine!) to delight her mother and aunt.

A detailed programme for a sample six-night holiday is available on request. There will be plenty of free time, but since we tap into the knowledge of local people, they will already have been booked and will be expecting us to arrive at a particular time. If you want a holiday doing whatever you want whenever you want, this isn’t the one for you. But if you want to step into an unmodern world, unwind and renew the quality of your family life while gaining new skills you can take home with you, then join us for an unforgettable journey.

Suitable for parents (single or couples) and children over 6. Small groups: maximum 10 people.

Accommodation is usually in double rooms with one bathroom per two double rooms; often you will be in your own apartment or cottage on a farm estate. If you put together your own group of 4 or more, we would be happy to create a programme especially for you.

Vegetarian Half Term

31 May — 5 June 2010 (5 nights)

We designed this exciting adventure specially for a vegetarian family with a 10-year-old daughter. They have asked us to invite another family with children of a similar age to join them. Room for one family only, so book NOW.

Monday 31 May Recommended flight: London Gatwick to Pisa on EasyJet 5233 Transfer to ‘Al Benefizio’, Barga, your accommodation during your stay, stopping at the ‘Devil’s Bridge’ on the way. Settle into your traditional Tuscan farm building converted to a comfortable holiday apartment on a farm that produces olive oil and honey.

Cooking lesson with a real Italian mamma, who will teach you how to cook the way she learned from her mother and grandmother. This lesson will include dishes based on some of the beautiful and tasty locally grown beans. Then relax on the terrace with spectacular views of Barga and the Serchio River valley and enjoy the meal you prepared.

Tuesday 1 June
Cheesemaking & Wool
Cerasa farm is a mountain paradise. Signora Emma uses milk from her own flock of Garfagnina sheep to make pecorino cheese and ricotta. In the dairy we watch the whole process. We meet the sheep and the ancient chestnut trees. Each tree has a name. Emma’s daughter has learned to dye the sheep’s wool with natural vegetable dyes, and the woollen products are available to buy at the farm. For lunch we sit down at the long chestnut table with the family to a meal composed almost entirely of food raised and prepared on the farm.

Handloom Cashmere Scarf Factory
See scarves being woven on traditional Garfagnana handlooms and shop at factory outlet prices for scarves designed for top international fashion houses.

Wednesday 2 June
Lucca
With its renaissance walls, its churches, its towers, its amphitheatre and its human size, Lucca offers many more attractions than its more famous enemy, Pisa. An important Roman city, in the Middle Ages a stopping point for pilgrims on their way to Rome, a centre of silk manufacture and banking in the Renaissance, beautified and landscaped during the reign of Elisa Bacciochi (Napoleon’s sister), the birthplace of Puccini and famed for its olive oil throughout its long history, all of which have left a legacy for us to enjoy today. You can hire bicycles and cycle around the walls.

We lunch in the historic cellars of an early 16th-century palace where the vegetarian fare is even better than the meat. The chef will personally choose three courses for you based on local seasonal ingredients, and each course will be matched to an appropriate Italian wine.

Chestnut Trail
An educational trail along which you learn about chestnut woodland, charcoal burning, mountain shrines and retting hemp to make fabric. Tonight our host Francesca and her daughter Vittoria have invited us to join them and their friends for a pizza party.

Thursday 3 June
Potato Bread, Farro & Beer
We go to the beautiful village of Petrognola to learn how to make traditional Garfagnana potato bread in a wood-fired oven. While the bread is rising, we’ll see the colossal farro-polishing machine. Farro (emmer) is an even more primitive form of wheat than spelt. One inhabitant with a passion for beer makes it with farro and we can visit his little brewery next door to the bakery. For lunch we’ll eat the bread we baked with some typical dishes made with farro, all washed down with farro beer.

Barga
After a rest at ‘Al Benefizio’ we go to Barga, which you’ve been looking at all week from your balcony. Barga is a picturesque mediaeval hilltop town with my favourite cathedral and a vibrant artistic community. After admiring the magnificent panoramic view of the limestone crags of the Alpi Apuane, you can shop for dinner to prepare at home or choose to stay on in Barga and eat at one of its restaurants.

Friday 4 June
Honey
The distinctive flavour of each type of honey is a revelation if you come from a country where honey is a sweet sticky substance that comes in jars labelled ‘Honey’. The flavours depend on the flowers from which the bees collect nectar, and, each is kept separate here. The acacia tree flowers in May and, by June, beekeepers will be extracting the delicate, pale honey from the hives. Francesca tells us about bee behaviour, and we help her extract the honey from the frames, after which we have lunch and taste the different honeys.

Wine Tasting
Fattoria Colleverde is a small wine and olive oil estate that has been organic since long before it became fashionable, and they are now biodynamic too. Their small production includes some of the best Colline Lucchesi DOC wines. We tour the cellars, the private olive press and taste the wines.

Silk
The production of silk was an important industry of Lucca from the Middle Ages, but it slowly declined and disappeared. Stefania Maffei’s grandmother raised silkworms, which she has reintroduced and learned the art of making silk. We help feed them mulberry leaves — you’ll be amazed how loud the munching is — and see the beautiful silk they produce.

Farewell dinner at a favourite family restaurant.

Saturday 5 June
Transfer to Pisa airport. Recommended flight: Pisa to London Gatwick on EasyJet 5232 departing 12:45

Price: €960 per person
The itinerary is subject to change if necessary due to weather or agricultural conditions or other events outside our control.

Includes:

• Services of Sapori e Saperi throughout your stay
• Accommodation for 5 nights
• Local ground transportation for 6 days
• Daily continental breakfast, 4 lunches, 3 dinners
• All activities shown in programme above

Does not include

• Airfares
• Travel and cancellation insurance
• Bicycle rental (about €2,50 per hour)
• Wine and drinks (other than those served with meals), additional meals and snacks
• Personal expenses

Autumn Half-Term Gastronomic Adventure for Families

Week of 23 October 2010

Special autumn activities:

• Pick olives, take them to a modern olive press, watch them being crushed to produce olive oil and take home a bottle of your own oil to amaze your friends. (And you’ll find out whether green and black olives are different types or whether all olives turn black in the end.)
• Visit a traditional olive press to see the huge stone wheels that grind the olives and learn why the oil doesn’t taste as good as the oil from a modern press.
• Visit a chestnut drying hut to see chestnuts drying and a water mill where they’ll be ground into flour after they’re dry.
• Cooking lessons with a young Italian chef at a picturesque restaurant in the middle of an olive grove — learn to make traditional dishes with olives, olive oil and chestnut flour that are easy to make with your children at home with the bonus of a healthy meal to enjoy with friends and family.
• Take a tour into a working marble quarry near Carrara, near where Michelangelo selected the marble for his sculptures.
• Spend an afternoon learning clay modelling with a ceramic artist (optional).

Accommodation
You will stay at Arcadia — a true pastoral paradise, where Enrico and Francesca have created a beautiful bed and breakfast in the house that was their family home for over 200 years. Their children, Elsbieta and Enrico have a tree house in the olive grove.

Price for 4 nights
€830 per person (same price for adults and children)

Includes accommodation, local transport, all meals (including wine with meals), olive picking and pressing, visits to producers and marble quarry — everything except your personal purchases and air or rail fares from your home to Pisa airport or Viareggio station.

Optional extras
• Clay modelling lesson with artist: €50 per person
• Stay an extra day for sightseeing at the nearby seaside resort of Viareggio, walking the old pilgrims’ routes and mule tracks in the mountains, shopping in fashionable Forte dei Marmi, visiting the Carnival Museum where they make floats for the famous Carnival parade before Lent: €190 per person.

LAST MINUTE SPECIAL
Group booking rate (minimum 8 people): €765 per person

Summer Gastronomic Adventures for Families

No fixed dates.

How the summer adventures work:

• You tell us when you want your adventure to start and for how long you want it to last.
• We check availability of suitable accommodation, create a programme and give you a costing. If two families want to come at the same time, we will place you at the same agriturismo (accommodation on a farm) and plan a programme suitable for the whole group. You have our full attention throughout your holiday.
• We fine-tune the itinerary to suit your requirements and adjust the costing if necessary. Once we’ve agreed the itinerary and the costing, we email you a booking form which you fill in and return to us with a deposit. The balance is due 8 weeks before the start of the tour.

Prices for sample 6-night adventure 

Up to 4 people
Option 1: Village house — no swimming pool, but an excellent public pool in Bagni di Lucca (15-minute drive — transport provided) about €1250 per person (same price for adults and children) 

Option 2: Converted farmhouse (with swimming pool) about €1470 per person (same price for adults and children) 

More than 4 people
Converted farmhouse (with swimming pool) about €1360 per person (same price for adults and children)

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.