A different way of experiencing Italy.
A private travel consultancy based in Florence, designing journeys across Italy
True Luxury Travels exists because the finest travel in Italy cannot be designed from outside it. Not from a catalogue, not from a supplier database, and not from an office in another country. It is designed by people who live here, eat here, and have spent years earning the introductions that make the difference between visiting Italy and being let into it.
We design private journeys for a limited number of clients each year.
We Are Based in Florence. Italy Is Not Our Product — It Is Our Home.
Florence is not our headquarters. It is where we live.
It means that when we recommend a restaurant in the Cilento or a producer in Valpolicella, we have eaten there and tasted with them. It means the winemaker, the museum scholar, and the villa owner are people we know by name rather than entries in a system. And it means that when something changes mid-journey — and in travel it does — we are in your time zone, awake, and already working on the alternative.
Everything we design begins here and extends outward: to the Val d'Orcia an hour south, to the coastlines and islands we reach by the means we arrange, to the Alpine valleys and wine regions that form the wider geography of the journeys we build.
Who we are
True Luxury Travels was founded in 2022 by Mattia De Pellegrino, who has worked in Italian travel since 2017.
He began as a driver-guide in Tuscany — which is an unglamorous way to learn a region and the best one. Several thousand kilometres of Tuscan road teach you which cellar door opens on a Sunday, which restaurant will hold a table past three, which route into Siena is worth the extra twenty minutes in August, and which promises a supplier will and will not keep. That knowledge is not available any other way, and it is still the foundation of how the company works.
True Luxury Travels was built to apply that standard across the whole country, and to the full architecture of a journey rather than a single element of it.
The full range of what we arrange
We are not a single-category agency. We design the complete architecture of a journey, with every element chosen to work with every other, managed by people who hold the whole picture at once.
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Bespoke Italy itineraries — designed around the client, not around a catalogue
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Private villa rental across Italy, including properties that are never publicly listed
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Yacht charter along the Italian coast and the wider Mediterranean
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Private jet charter and full private aviation management
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Helicopter tours, transfers, and aerial experiences
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Venice Simplon-Orient-Express — cabin and suite advisory, and the itinerary either side of it
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Private cultural access — after-hours museums, private palazzi, master artisans, historic institutions
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Golf and wine circuits across the peninsula
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Harvest and cellar experiences during vendemmia
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Special occasions — proposals, anniversaries, private events in historic settings
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Hotel advisory and suite access at the finest properties in Italy
What we believe — and what we don't
We do not believe luxury is a category. A five-star hotel is not automatically better than three rooms above a farm worked by the same family for six generations, if the farm produces the better memory.
We do not believe a full itinerary is a better itinerary than a spacious one. The number of things in a week is not a measure of the week.
And we do not believe the best Italy is the most famous Italy. The most photographed terrace on the Amalfi Coast, the most driven road in the Val d'Orcia, the most booked estate in Chianti — these are not necessarily the finest things those places have.
What we do believe is that the best version of a destination is the one designed for the specific person standing in it, and that designing it requires being here, over time, paying attention.
We work with a limited number of clients at any one time. That is a practical constraint rather than a positioning statement: the level of attention a True Luxury Travels programme requires cannot be sustained across an unlimited number of simultaneous journeys. We chose depth over volume at the start, and we have not revisited the decision.
Who we work with
Our clients are individuals and families for whom travel is a serious pleasure and a serious investment — of money, but more often of time and attention. They have travelled widely. They know the difference between a good experience and an exceptional one. Most have either grown tired of what conventional luxury travel offers, or have long suspected there was a better version and were looking for the right introduction to it.
Many have travelled with us for several years and return each season. Others arrive through their recommendation. We do not advertise in any conventional sense.
We work with clients across Europe, the United States, the Gulf, and Asia-Pacific — wherever people care enough about Italy to want it properly.
An introductory call carries no obligation and no sales process. The most useful way to understand what we do is to tell us what you are looking for and let us describe how we would approach it.
Begin the conversation
Tell us where you want to go, how you want to travel, and what you have not yet been able to find. We will tell you what is possible — which, in our experience, is more than most people expect.