Inspiration: discover the Blog

A Custom Italy Honeymoon: How to Design the Perfect Italian Journey for Two

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.

Italy does not simply offer romance. It insists on it — in the amber light of a Venetian canal at dusk, in the silence between cypress trees in the Val d'Orcia, in the weight of a Venetian glass raised over a lagoon. For the luxury traveler who values intimacy as much as grandeur, few destinations on earth rival Italy's gift for the private, the indelible, and the exquisitely unrepeatable.

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.

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

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