Personalized and day adventures

We love helping you create your own personal gastronomic itinerary to Lucca and the Garfagnana. It can be just for a day or as long as you like. Here’s how it works:

Decide when you want to take your vacation. Each season has its culinary and cultural excitements. Look at the list below to see just a few of the highlights of each month.
Email us to receive a full ‘Menu’ of what’s going on in the month of your choice. The Monthly Menus include cultural and outdoor activities as well as culinary ones.
Contact us and give us the dates of your stay and what interests you on the Monthly Menu.
We create an itinerary, suggest suitable restaurants and give you a costing (see below for charging basis).
We fine-tune the itinerary to suit your requirements and adjust the costing if necessary.
Once we’ve agreed the itinerary and the fee, 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 or on the day of the tour in the case of one-day tours.

Monthly Highlights

January The good witch Befana rides her broom on the 5th. Appennine ski slopes are usually open (check the snow reports) and there might be a pig slaughter and insaccata (putting pork in a sack to make sausages, salami, head cheese). Otherwise, it’s pretty cold and quiet.		February Carnival: celebrations and banquets to say farewell to meat (carne) before Lent. Viareggio is second only to Venice for its Carnival parade. A good time for an orgy of meat-eating and finding out how salami and sausages are made.
March Festival of Camellias (green and black teas are camellia leaves) on the first three weekends and an olive oil festival at the end of the month.	April Spring: azaleas and wildflowers. Visit a shepherd and watch cheese being made. Taste all the produce of the region: cheese, honey, bread, salumi (prosciutto and all those exquisite cured pork products) and ‘Lucca gold’ — the olive oil.	May Acacia begins to bloom and in the second half of the month we can visit beekeepers to watch the honey extraction and taste the intense single-flower honeys. Families: UK school half-term special family adventures.
June Trout from clear mountain streams, wild paeonies and the summer solstice.	July Farro or emmer is a primitive wheat that was cultivated by the first farmers more than 10,000 years ago and is grown still in the Garfagnana. Its harvest in July is accompanied by a festival and feasting with farro beer of course. Indulge with prosecco and dinner as you float serenely across Lago Massaciuccoli to the Puccini Opera Festival at Torre del Lago.	August Now that the wheat harvest is finished, everyone is making bread. It seems every village celebrates in food and music its own special bread from flat bread like tortillas to yeasty focaccia-style breads and potato bread with a special preservation order on it from Slow Food. Puccini plus prosecco plus opera in a baroque theatre and under the stars in villa gardens.
September Porcini are hiding in the woods (if the conditions are exactly right), but flaunt themselves on restaurant menus. Wine grapes are being picked, pork butchers throw a party in a castle, squash growers stage an art festival and chocolate making begins again.	October The weather is cooler but still enjoyably warm. Sheep come down from the high alpine pastures and we can watch cheese being made. Chestnut-drying huts are fired up. Black truffles appear on restaurant menus and villagers begin to taste their new wine.
November Pick your own olives, take them to the press and go home with your own olive oil. Chestnuts as pancakes, porridge, pasta, bread and roasted. Paper sculptures in the streets and demonstrations of paper making.	December More chestnuts, a chocolate festival and Christmas. Villages reinvent themselves as living presepi (crèches) with inhabitants carrying out traditional crafts and of course serving traditional food and drink.	All year Cooking lessons, wine tastings, marble quarries, sculpture studios, cigar factory tour and much more.

Fees
Up to 3 people
I pick you up in my car wherever you’re staying and take you to the places you want to go and tell you as much as you want to know about the people and places we visit. For this service, I charge €180 euros for one person, €100 euros per person for two people, €80 euros per person for three people per day plus €50 euros per day for transport.

More than 3 people
4 people: €75 euros per person per day
5–7 people: €60 euros per person per day
Please ask for special quote for more than 7 people.
Plus cost of transport which will be in a luxury mini-van with driver (depends on number of hours: approximately €370 euros per 8-hour day).

Other charges
Entrance fees (often free, but no more than €10-15 euros per person), cost of your own meals and mine (from €20 euros for an osteria to €50 euros per person for a Michelin-starred restaurant), cooking lessons, horse riding, concert tickets.

Site design: Duncan Designs · Last updated: 14 March 2008 · Photo Credits: Marion Edwards, O’Connor, Duncan Fielden, Andrew Houston and many of our adventurers