Inspiration: discover the Blog

Nestled at the foot of the Alps, the Italian Lakes have drawn the world's most discerning travellers for centuries. Lake Como, Lake Garda, and Lake Maggiore each possess a singular character — yet together they form one of Europe's great journeys. This guide explores what makes each lake extraordinary, and why the most rewarding way to experience them is through a bespoke, expert-guided itinerary.

Between Modena and Bologna, in forty kilometres of the Po Valley, the internal combustion engine was elevated to an art form. We open doors here that do not open for ordinary visitors — and we arrange what happens once you are inside.

Few experiences in Italian travel match the particular pleasure of sitting in a frescoed loggia above a terraced hillside, a glass of aged Amarone in hand, watching the light change on the Valpolicella. This is what we design: access, depth and the unhurried time to absorb both.

An hour north of Venice, the Prosecco Hills rise in vine-striped terraces that no machine can work. The wine made here — tasted at source, in the specific vineyard that produced it — is something quite unlike the version of its name that travels the world.

Fifteen million people visit Venice each year. We take our guests before most of them arrive, into spaces most of them never find, and out by private boat to islands the day-trippers cannot reach before the afternoon light is gone.

The most beautiful lake in Italy and the most serious sparkling wine south of Champagne occupy the same Lombard landscape, an hour apart. We have spent years understanding both. The programme we design does justice to each.

Portofino has been the object of intelligent desire for seventy years. The painted harbour, the pine-covered promontory, the piazzetta at six in the evening: none of it disappoints. The question is only how to experience it without the crowds. We have the answer.

The five villages of the Cinque Terre cling to the Ligurian coast with the tenacity of people who have always understood that the sea is both their livelihood and their escape route. The best way to visit them is still the one their founders used: from the water.

The Langhe hills south of Alba produce two of the world's great red wines, one of its most expensive natural foods, and some of its most refined cooking. In October, when the vines turn gold and the truffle season opens, there is nowhere in Italy we would rather take you.

The region that invented the concept of cucina ricca invites a particular kind of travel: early mornings, working kitchens, the people who know. Parma is not a city that needs to explain itself to anyone who has tasted its products properly. We arrange the conditions for that tasting.

Private itineraries through the Dolomites — the German-Italian Christmas at its most authentic, in the weeks the markets are at their proper register. There is a particular evening in the second week of December at the Christmas market in the small Alto Adige town of Brunico — Bruneck, in the local German — when the snow has begun to fall on the wooden stalls in the central piazza, the mulled wine vendors are running at capacity, the brass quintet from the local conservatory

Como, Garda and Maggiore for the discerning traveller — a frank guide to a region that most international visitors meet only through one of its three faces. There is a tendency among visitors to Italy to speak of the Italian Lakes as though they were a single phenomenon — a region, a shared character, an experience that one chooses simply by deciding to spend a few days at altitude on water. They are not. The three major lakes — Como, Garda and Maggiore — are each genuinely d

Villa d'Este golf, fireside dinners and the last golden light — the case for Como in October, when the lake quietens and the chestnut trees turn. There are perhaps three weeks each October on Lake Como when the lake recovers a quality of stillness that is otherwise rare in its calendar. The summer hotel guests have departed. The big late-September weddings have wrapped. The Como Open golf at Villa d'Este has finished. The chestnut trees on the lower slopes of the eastern shor

High cuisine, via ferrata and Europe's great Alpine secret — the case for the Italian Alps in the months when most travellers think of the sea. The Italian Dolomites in summer are perhaps the best-kept open secret in European travel. The North Americans who know the Dolomites largely know them as a winter destination; the Italians who know them best go in summer. The reason is simple: the same peaks that in February frame the ski terrain become, between June and September, th

An insider's autumn in Piedmont — the Alba truffle market, the cellars in their post-harvest mood, and the rituals that make this October week unrepeatable. There is a small wooden stall at the back of the Alba truffle market, on the third Saturday of October each year, that is run by a man named Battista whose family has been hunting the white truffle in the woods around Roddi for three generations. His stock on a typical Saturday is perhaps twenty pieces, ranging from the s

Alpine heritage, long lunches and the Dolomite peaks — Cortina d'Ampezzo in the season the locals quietly prefer to the winter one. There is a question one occasionally hears, in the bars of Cortina in mid-August, about which of the two seasons the town's regulars actually prefer. The winter answer is the obvious one: this is the most cosmopolitan of the Italian Alpine resorts, the host of the 2026 Winter Olympics, the seat of an Italian society that has wintered here since t

Villa del Balbianello by private tender — and an argument for arriving on Lake Como in March, when the lake remembers itself. There is a fortnight in late March on Lake Como, sometimes a week longer, sometimes shorter, when the lake feels almost private. The hotels have opened — most of them — but they are not yet full. The summer ferries have not yet doubled their schedule. The villa gardens, especially the great ones at the western end, are entering the brief and almost unb

Barolo cellars, fireside dinners and the Langhe in winter — three days that explain why this corner of Italy belongs to those who have learned to wait. There is a particular cold in the Langhe in February that the locals describe as giusto — proper, correct, the cold the wine wants. It is not the harsh, dry cold of the Alps further north; it is a damp, fog-edged cold that sits low in the valleys, lifts by mid-morning, and leaves the vineyards smelling of wet earth and woodsmo

Private palazzi, masked galas and the city beyond the crowds, for the traveller who wants Carnival as it was — not as it is performed. The Carnival of Venice is the most photographed event in Italy, and yet the photograph and the event are scarcely the same thing. The photograph is the daylight Carnival of Piazza San Marco — a festival of costumed amateurs, posing for cameras, performed for cameras, and over by sundown. The event itself, the Carnival the Venetians have kept a

Private chalets, Cortina, and the quiet glamour of Alpine Italy in the months when the peaks are at their most theatrical. There is a sound that the Dolomites make in January, just before dawn, that no other mountain range produces. It is the sound of cold air settling into the bowls between the peaks — a particular silence, more silent than other silences, broken occasionally by the slow creak of a larch branch under snow. To wake in a chalet at altitude in this part of Ital