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:
Pork + Porcini

September and October

Early autumn, the heat of the summer lingers on, but in the cool, still-green chestnut woods, there are treasures to be found. With the help of a very patient local wild mushroom expert, you can get your eye in and experience the thrill of discovering the highly prized porcini. Porcini are shyer than shrinking violets, and if the weather hasn’t been just right, we’ll have to feast on them in local restaurants instead of finding them ourselves. The pig would never dream of hiding and is on show all year, but Autumn was the traditional time to slaughter the family pig, preferably fattened on chestnuts in these same woods. How can a single pig provide such a rich variety of different products and delectable flavours? Can lardo (pork fat!) really be edible? On this Adventure, you’ll get your teeth into these finger-licking problems and wash them down with excellent wines. Activities include:

• Introduction to wild mushrooms of the area
• Trek through chestnut woods to hunt for wild mushrooms, harvest chestnuts and observe the ancient Cinta Senese breed of pigs
• Visit the Colonnata producers of lardo, pork fat which is cured with salt and wild herbs in a basin made from the famed marble of Carrara, taken from the same quarries which Michelangelo used for his sculptures
• Learn to cook wild mushrooms and local breeds of pork with real Italian mammas

• Attend a village feast to celebrate porchetta (roast suckling pig)
• 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 Angelini family and witness them making biroldo (traditional Garfagnana blood sausage)
• 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.