Inspiration: discover the Blog

There is a moment — standing barefoot on a wooden platform while a craftsman traces the exact contour of your foot with a pencil — when you understand that what you are commissioning is not merely footwear. It is a document of who you are.

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.

Venice, Florence, Cortina — a curated guide to the closing night of the year, for clients who have asked us where in Italy is the right place to spend it. We are asked, in late September each year, by perhaps a dozen of our most established clients, the same question: where in Italy is the right place to spend New Year's Eve. The question is more interesting than it first appears, because the Italian Capodanno is not, in any meaningful sense, a single tradition. It is a serie

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.

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