Cheese + Honey | Pork + Porcini | Olive Oil, Chestnuts + Polenta | Gastronomic Adventures for Familes
Bare Oil in Tuscany | Slow Food Salone del Gusto + Lucca | Cooking Lessons and Courses

Packaged adventures:
Slow Food Salone del Gusto + Lucca

23 October – 1 November 2008 (SGL08/2)

Imagine the most delicious food you’ve ever tasted from all around the world stretching in almost infinite variety as far as the eye can see. Now conjure up the people who grew and produced this food, many in colourful native costumes, all eager for you to taste their unique products. Then add taste workshops and dinners in the best Piemontese restaurants, and you have an inkling of the delights of Slow Food’s biennial Salone del Gusto, an enormous food fair held in the Lingotto Fiere, the historic Fiat factory in Turin.

This adventure begins at the Salone del Gusto and includes a private walking tour of Turin’s elegant baroque architecture. After an orgy of seeing and tasting, we proceed to Sapori e Saperi’s home territory of Lucca and the Garfagnana for a bit of action behind the scenes. The olive harvest is just beginning and you will pick your own olives, take them to the press and see them pressed into oil. We penetrate the mysterious chestnut forests to discover firsthand how chestnuts are dried to make flour. There’s plenty of tasting, eating and drinking here too: wine tasting and meals in family restaurants, plus a visit to a handloom cashmere scarf factory and a factory that still makes hand-rolled cigars (but not on bare thighs à la Carmen).

Escorted throughout by Heather Jarman. Meals at Villa Buonvisi cooked by Ann Meyer of Cooking with Meyer.

Adventure highlights (full itinerary available on request)

• Two days in Turin at Slow Food’s Salone del Gusto plus walking tour of baroque architecture.
• Pick olives on an organic estate owned by Slow Food members. Take the olives to the olive press and come away with your very own bottle of famed Lucca olive oil.
• Wine tasting at Fattoria Colleverde whose small organic production includes some of the best wines of the Colline Lucchesi territory.
• Lunch at Il Vecchio Mulino where you feast on an extraordinary array of the best produce the Garfagnana has to offer in Andrea Bertucci’s alternative gastronomic universe.
• A walk through chestnut woods to Beppe’s metato (chestnut-drying house) and Marco’s Cinta Senese pig herd.
• Visit a small factory that weaves cashmere scarves for the top European fashion houses on traditional Garfagnana handlooms and shop at the factory outlet at greatly reduced prices.
• Visit the picturesque mediaeval town of Barga and the exquisite walled town of Lucca. Among its treasures are its landscaped Renaissance walls, the amphitheatre still bearing traces of its Roman and mediaeval origins, many churches, paintings and sculptures, not to mention shops and cafés.
• Private tour of the gardens at Villa Reale: a tapestry of baroque fantasies woven into an English landscape park by Elisa Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon and ruler of Lucca from 1805–1815.
• A hands-on cooking lesson with Gianluca Pardini, who teaches in America and Japan as well as running his own school in his native town of Lucca. His deep knowledge of the local cuisine combined with his lively sense of humour make his lessons both fun and informative.
• For chocoholics a visit to a chocolate laboratorio.
• A tour of Lucca’s cigar factory and an opportunity to witness the considerable skill and knowledge required for fermenting the tobacco, rolling a cigar by hand and aging it to perfection.
• Farewell dinner at Michelin-starred restaurant La Mora.

Accommodation

Turin: Hotel Victoria
4-star boutique hotel located in historic centre of Turin, with health centre and swimming pool available free to residents

Lucca: Villa Buonvisi (pictured right)
Traditional Tuscan villa, all bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, outdoor private swimming pool and tennis courts

Fee: €2295 per person, single supplement €290 per person

The itinerary is subject to change by us if necessary due to weather or agricultural conditions and other events outside our control.

Your fee includes:

Your fee excludes: International air fares; Travel insurance (compulsory); Lunches: 4; Dinners: 2

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.