March

You'll know the end of winter is near when you see the camellias in flower at a festival with parti-coloured beans, tea and olive oil. Beans and sausages are inseparable in Tuscany, which leads to a visit to a pork butcher. It's still cool enough to enjoy warming up by baking bread with the village baker.

Sample activities

Visit a pork butcher and find out how they make those incomparable Italian cured meats
Wine tasting at the vineyard you see from the pork butcher's workshop
Learn to make sausages yourself
Cheese, 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
Join the locals at an international camellia festival in a village famous for its tea plantation, olive oil and many types of beans
Use your sausages and the festival beans in a cooking lesson
Spend a day in a village where ancient and modern work together in harmony: bake Garfagnana potato bread with the village baker in his wood-fired oven, visit farro fields and state-of-the-art farro polishing machine
Visit the water mill where the baker's farro is ground
Tour the walled town of Lucca with a descendant of one of the thirteen ruling families of the Renaissance
Dine at the home of an Italian family where mamma is a superb cook
Meals in family restaurants off the beaten track

Ask us for our full menu of activities since we're always finding new interesting producers.