Inspiration: discover the Blog

Rome has been overwhelming visitors for three thousand years. The difference between being overwhelmed and being transformed is the quality of the preparation and the access. We provide both.

There are destinations that seduce you with their beauty alone, and then there are places that reveal themselves slowly — through a bolt of hand-loomed cashmere draped across a sun-warmed counter, a pair of sandals traced to your foot on a cobblestone floor, a ceramic glazed in colors that exist only on this particular stretch of Italian coastline. Portofino and Positano are 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A gastronomic atlas — the eleven Italian restaurants currently holding three Michelin stars, and how to assemble a journey around them. The high gastronomic geography of Italy, in the current Michelin guide, consists of eleven three-starred restaurants. They are scattered across the peninsula in a pattern that bears a certain logic — Piedmont and Lombardy in the north, two in the Dolomites, one each in Tuscany, Umbria, the Roman countryside, the Amalfi Coast, the Tyrrhenian,

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

Navigating the coast without the crowds — a working strategy for the most heavily visited weeks on the most heavily photographed coastline in Europe. There is a moment, around eleven in the morning on a Tuesday in mid-July, when the Piazzetta in Capri reaches its annual condition of structural impossibility. The funicular has just delivered another six hundred passengers from Marina Grande. The four cafés around the square are at capacity. The narrow shopping streets that rad

The case for January in Rome, Florence and Venice — when the cities reveal themselves to those who know how to read them. There is a photograph that hangs in the office of a friend of ours, a Roman architect, taken on the morning of the third of January some years ago. It shows the Pantheon at first light — empty, just empty, the great rotunda holding nothing but a single oblique shaft of winter sun falling through the oculus onto wet travertine. He framed it because he said

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