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.

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.

Sicily is not merely the largest island in the Mediterranean. It is a civilisation of its own — Greek, Arab, Norman, Spanish — whose layered history produced architecture, art and food of extraordinary originality. Eastern and western Sicily offer different experiences. We design both.

The Amalfi Coast is the most visually overwhelming landscape on the Italian peninsula. Pompeii is the most complete record of Roman daily life in existence. Paestum contains Greek temples better preserved than anything in Greece. We design the programme that moves between all three without compromise.

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.

Lecce is built in a stone so soft it was carved like butter, and the seventeenth-century masons who worked it covered every surface with figures, foliage and fantastical ornament that has no equivalent in Italian baroque architecture. The Salento coast below it is among the last wild Mediterranean coastlines. Together they form the most complete itinerary in the heel of Italy.

Matera is one of the oldest continuously inhabited urban settlements in the world, and one of the most extraordinary places in Italy. The wine produced on the volcanic slopes an hour to the north is one of the most powerful red wines in the peninsula. Together, they form a southern Italian itinerary with no equivalent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Why the connoisseur's month is booked a year in advance — and what the experienced Italian traveller has come to expect from these particular weeks. Among the small private agreements that the experienced Italian traveller makes with the year, the most important is, in our view, the agreement about September. The agreement is that nothing else in the calendar will be allowed to interfere with it. School schedules, board meetings, the late summer demands of family life — these

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

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.