Inspiration: discover the Blog

In 1968, a Tuscan nobleman released the first vintage of Sassicaia in the face of everything the Italian wine establishment believed. The result changed Italian wine permanently. We arrange the cellar visits that show you why.

Western Tuscany offers two cities of a very different character from the wine-and-cypress landscapes of the south. Lucca is the most elegantly preserved walled city in Italy. Pisa contains, in a single piazza, three of the most important Romanesque buildings in the Western world.

The hills between Florence and Siena have been producing wine for three thousand years. The black rooster of the Gallo Nero marks the original Chianti territory — and the finest expression of Sangiovese in Tuscany. We know the producers, the vineyards and the tables that make this zone worth a dedicated journey.

The triangle of territory between Florence, the sea and the Apennines preserves a medieval landscape of completeness found nowhere else in Italy. Three cities in particular — Siena, San Gimignano and Volterra — represent the summit of what the Italian city-state achieved in stone, paint and civic organisation.

The Val d'Orcia is the landscape that defines the popular image of Tuscany. The three towns at its heart — Montalcino, Montepulciano and Pienza — produce between them two of Italy's greatest red wines and one of its finest cheeses. We design the itinerary that does justice to all three.

Few cities in the world have shaped the language of luxury as quietly and completely as Florence. In its leather, you can read the whole story.

Florence contains more great art per square metre than any other city on earth. We take our guests there before most other visitors arrive, with the kind of guidance that transforms what you are looking at into what you will carry for the rest of your life.

Eastern Tuscany is quieter than the wine routes to the west and the art cities to the north. Arezzo contains one of the supreme achievements of Italian fresco painting. Cortona is one of the oldest cities on the peninsula. Together, they reward the traveller who has moved beyond the obvious programme.

Private access to Italy's most storied horse race — a ninety-second event built on a year of preparation, and the most considered way to attend it. There is no event in Italy that explains the country to a foreign visitor as efficiently as the Palio di Siena. It lasts ninety seconds. It has been run, in essentially the same form, since 1656. It is not a sporting event in any modern sense; it is a civic and religious rite that the city of Siena has kept alive while the rest of

Private vendemmia in Montalcino and Bolgheri — what it means to spend a day inside the harvest at one of the great Italian estates.

Private Uffizi openings, Medici villas and artisan ateliers — the city as it can still be visited, with the right planning. There is a question that surfaces in nearly every Florence consultation we have: whether it is still possible to enjoy the city. The answer, we believe, is yes — but only if the visit is conceived as something different from what most visitors arrive intending it to be. The Florence of the day-visitor — the queue at the Uffizi, the sea of hats on the Pon

Vineyard estates, Chianti Classico and the season of the iris — the case for April in the country between Florence and Siena. There is a Tuscany of late summer, the parched-gold one of the photographs, and there is a Tuscany of April that almost no visitor sees. The April Tuscany is green — properly green, a green that the rest of the year does not produce — and it is wet underfoot, and the wisteria climbs the loggias in long blue ribbons, and the irises that the Florentines

From secret Chianti cellars to dawn flights over the Val d'Orcia — how to experience Tuscany the way it was meant to be seen, felt, and tasted.