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:
Olive Oil, Chestnuts + Polenta

Mid-October to mid-December

Late autumn and the world wears a gold theme — the chestnut leaves are yellow and falling fast. It’s time for the olive harvest. The oil is called ‘Lucca gold’, which is why it’s so surprising to see that the newly pressed oil is grass green. But then, almost everything is surprising about this Adventure. You’ll discover that oil vintages are as important as wine vintages. And who would have thought that you could taste the difference between five polentas made with different maize flour — and want to take some home to cook it again and again? Activities include:

• Wine and olive oil tasting
• Pick and press olives, and bottle your own oil
• Walk in chestnut woods to see chestnuts drying in a metato (traditional drying house) and taste cakes and beer made from chestnuts
• Visit Ercolano Regoli, fourth-generation miller, at his eighteenth-century water mill where wheat, maize and chestnuts are still being ground on traditional millstones
• Visit Alvaro Ferrari, maize farmer and champion polenta cook, to understand what makes ancient 8-row maize distinctive
• 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

• Learn to cook with local autumn ingredients with real Italian mammas
• Polenta, 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
• Special guided tour of the gardens at Villa Reale, Marlia, one of the villas owned by Elisa Bonaparte
• 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.