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!

Spring Half-Term

Spring Half-Term

Spring Half-Term

• It's Carnival time. Dress up in a costume and join the festive crowds at the Carnival parade in Viareggio (Sundays only).
• Visit the Carnival museum to find out how they make the enormous papier mâché floats.
• Visit a pork butcher and learn how to make sausages.
• Go to the fish market, watch the family fishermen unloading their boats and choose the fish you want for lunch.
• Visit a lardo producer and discover how pork fat and mountain herbs are cured in a marble box. Take a tour in a working marble quarry near Carrara, near where Michelangelo selected the marble for his sculptures and visit a sculpture studio.
• Cooking lessons with an Italian mamma — learn to make zuppa alla frantoiana (minestrone), traditional fish dishes of Viareggio and other warming winter dishes.

5-night stay at bed & breakfast with 50% planned activities

Prices starting from €750 per person

Summer Half-Term

Summer Half-Term

Summer Half-Term

• Visit a beekeeper, help extract honey from the comb and taste the distinctive flavour of the different types of honey. Take home a jar of your own honey.
• Visit a sheep farm that is preserving the local breed of sheep. Help mamma make pecorino cheese and ricotta. Watch her daughter dying the sheep's wool. Meet the sheep and centuries old chestnut trees, each with its own name. Have lunch with the family.
• Learn to make pizza and have fun at a pizza party with new Italian friends.
• Visit Lucca and cycle around the town on top of the Renaissance walls.
• Cooking lessons with an Italian mamma — learn to make traditional dishes with summer vegetables, ricotta and nettles that you pick yourselves (gloves provided).
• Visit a woman who raises silkworms and help feed the caterpillars—you'll be amazed how loud their munching is. See the cocoons and find out how you unwind the silk threads.

5-night stay at agriturismo with 50% planned activities

Prices starting from €675 per person

Summer Holidays

Summer Holidays

Summer Holidays

• Find out all about making cheese. Visit a cheesemaker, help her make goat's milk cheese and ricotta. Taste the fresh sweet curds and the mature cheese.
• Walk up the Orrido di Botri gorge wading in the river and learning about the plants and rocks.
• Collect your ideal lunch at open air markets, fruit and vegetable farmers and a dairy farmer. Spread out your picnic in the park at the top of the aqueduct that takes drinking water to Lucca.
• Join Italian families at summer village festivals, including a mediaeval festival with bandits.
• Taste and smell workshop learning aromatic herbs.
• Visit a farm, make focaccia and bread with mamma, meet the pigs and donkeys, lunch at the farm.

7-night stay at agriturismo with 50% planned activities

Prices starting from €820 per person

Autumn Half-Term

Autumn Half-Term

Autumn Half-Term

• 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 an Italian mamma — 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.
• Make bread with the village baker, meet his pigs and cows, learn about farro (primitive wheat), lunch cooked by the baker's wife.

5-night stay at agriturismo with 50% planned activities

Prices starting from €675 per person