Este fort

Trassilico from the fort

This year a native of Trassilico, a pensioner who had been an archivist in the Lucca State Archives, offered to give us a guided tour of his beloved village. Pietro Rocchi welcomed us on the warm summer evening and led us to a spring with a long history and many legends attached to it. Since he spoke only Italian, it was my job to interpret to my guests. I begged him in advance to speak slowly and clearly and to leave time for me to translate, but his enthusiasm kept running away with him. What he was explaining was genuinely interesting, but its intricate detail was akin to examining each individual stitch in a complex tapestry. There weren’t any historians in the group, and I could see several beginning to shiver in the damp shade of the stone structure around the spring.

Spring at Trassilico

We managed to lure Pietro up to the rocca, the Este fort, still warm in the rays of the setting sun, but not without many a stop on the way to show us the exact spots where the tough inhabitants had bravely resisted recurrent sieges, tricked their enemies and won the battles. Now the group became interested and began to ask questions.

The way up to the fort

Pietro waiting for us to catch up

We made it

It was worth it

On the way back down to the main piazza by a different route, Pietro showed us a wall partly constructed of old tombstones. He was the person who had deciphered the inscriptions and signs carved on them and had realised that the cemetery from which they came must have spanned the transitional period from paganism to Christianity. The retired Episcopalian minister in the group explained some puzzling symbols, which Pietro was interested to know about too.

The piazza

Back in the piazza some of us tucked into the festival food while others preferred a small restaurant that, with typical village hospitality, provided a table for our communal supper, even though we weren’t all ordering from its menu.

Hospitable restaurant

I later wrote to the friend of a friend who had recommended Pietro as a guide to thank him. I said how interesting it was, but perhaps a wee bit too long and detailed. He reproved me with this slow travel wisdom: ‘When Pietro is your guide, he is like a river in flood and from that one sees all the love he bears toward his village. Your clients must keep in mind that a tour of Europe cannot be accomplished in a week or there is the danger of Stendhal’s syndrome.’ The alarming symptoms include rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and sometimes hallucinations when exposed to a large amount of especially beautiful art or a surfeit of choice among too much beauty. Whew! That was a lucky escape. Much healthier to slow one’s pace, to bathe in the flow of Pietro’s words, to take time to ask questions and engage in a dialogue, and to appreciate the depth of history in a single extremely beautiful village.

A street in Trassilico

Heather Jarman invites you on inspiring culinary tours of life behind the scenes that you won’t find in any guidebook — get to know the food artisans and craftspeople of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont and Liguria. Come join me and my Italian friends and dip into a lifestyle where lunch is more important than business. Find out more at Sapori e Saperi Adventures and follow Heather’s own adventures on her blog.

Slow Travel Tours is an affiliation of small-group tour operators who offer personalized trips in Italy, France and other European countries.

Although most of our European Experiences weeks are open to anyone, we do offer some trips for a very special group: women travelers. We’ve already designated our May 19-26, 2012 Luberon Experience trip as a special Women’s Week. We’re also considering opening up a second Women’s Week in the Chianti region of Tuscany the week of June 9-16.

Laughing in the Luberon (photo contest winner by Lindsay)

Women’s Week is very important to me personally… it’s the trip I’d always dreamed of! I met Charley when I was 35 and we got married the next year. Before then I’d always wanted to go to Europe, but I didn’t have anyone to go with.  After Charley and I got married and started traveling together, I met many women who wanted to travel abroad but didn’t want to go alone or end up on a tour surrounded by couples. My European travel experiences had such an impact on me, and I really wanted to help more women travel and especially to experience our beautiful area of Provence. So when we started European Experiences, Charley and I decided to designate at least one of our weeks each year as a “Women’s Week.” He and I both really look forward to these groups.

Lisa traveled solo from Australia

Since our first Luberon Experience Women’s Week in 2007, our all-women groups have included women of all ages, from all over the USA, Australia and Canada. Our women’s groups have included solo travelers, college roommates, friends, mothers and daughters, and sisters. These groups bond very quickly, and in just a few hours, everyone is among friends. I love being part of these groups.

I asked several women who have been part of our Womens Weeks groups to share more about their experiences:

“We had organized a group of girlfriends. My friend Lavonne suggested we do a girls’ trip to Provence and I found Kathy and Charley’s week to be a perfect fit. We all loved visiting gardens, shopping in charming markets, dining on great food and fabulous wines, laughing, and exploring lovely Provence with our experienced guides who took us to the best of the best. It was worry free–no decisions, just have fun. I especially spending the week with my sister who had never travelled abroad.” (Lindsay – California)

Sharing the Luberon with new friends

“I’m not a big traveler and this was my first trip to Europe. My husband doesn’t travel at all but my sister Eileen is an experienced traveler. The Luberon Experience Women’s Week was exactly what we needed for my first trip abroad. I did not have to decide where to eat, what to see, and most of all how to get around in a foreign country.

Our group included another pair of sisters, a mother and daughter, two childhood friends, and one single traveler. We mixed and mingled all week, and many of us still keep in touch. I think Women’s Week is a fabulous idea for a female single traveler.  I’ll do another trip with Kathy and Charley. I would not hesitate to go alone because I know once I am introduced to the group, I’ll have companions for the week and friends for a lifetime.” (Lorraine – South Carolina)

“As I was travelling on my own, I thought it more likely that within an all women’s group I would be included by others in activities in the non-structured tour times. I was right. I loved the flexibility. If in the free time I wanted to read a book or have a sleep, I could. Or if I wanted to go for a walk, go shopping or go to a café or restaurant, there always seemed to be someone else to share this experience with. Everyone got along together very well. It was great getting to know everyone and sharing our life stories. I felt there developed over the week a very strong sense of companionship within this lovely group of women with such different lives. We enjoyed a lot of laughter and good times – who could forget our wonderful lunch with our host playing the guitar and singing whilst some of the group danced!” (Lisa – Queensland, Australia)

Anne enjoyed the trip with her mom

Sisters Cathy and Ginny had an adventure

“My mother and I chose the Women’s Week tour because it seemed so very appropriate for us as a mother/daughter duo. It was a wonderful opportunity to connect with other women and each other. I really enjoyed the feeling of camaraderie in our group. There was a feeling of easy companionship, a feeling of acceptance, and at times a shared joy in the experience. One special memory is the ‘on your own’ evening meal my mom and I shared with two of the women we met in our group. We ate at the restaurant across the street from our B&B. We laughed and celebrated, sharing amazing conversation, food and wine.” (Anne – Minnesota)

“My sister Ginny and I wanted a small group tour in Provence and The Luberon Experience had everything we wanted. We also wanted to be in Paris on my 50th birthday and in Provence the next week. It happened to work out for us that it was Women’s Week.  I think we would have come regardless of that, but it really was a lot of fun. The women in the group seemed to be interested in the same types of things for the most part. We were very cohesive.” (Cathy – Iowa)

This was definitely a memorable Women's Week!

Valerie joined us for Women’s Week in 2009 and enjoyed it so much that she and her friend Julie came back this summer for one of our other Luberon Experience groups. “The women’s trip was a chance for all of us women to eat as much as we like, drink as much as we like, shop till we drop, and even have a beer and play cards, all while enjoying the most lovely place on earth. The trips themselves were the two best I ever had…well-orchestrated, friendly, fun-filled and full of warmth and charm.” (Valerie – Montana)

An all-women's group with Adventures in Italy

Fellow Slow Travel tour leader Kristi Steiner and her husband Bill of Adventures in Italy also often host all-women’s group and she beautifully describes what we’ve experienced in our Women’s Week. “Because most of our trips focus on exploring a creative art form while in Italy, our guests are often women. We see their level of sharing, of connecting, and of relaxing comfortably in this foreign land heightened by being with other women. Total strangers almost instantly become friends and often stay in close touch upon returning home.  We love our all-women’s groups because of the beautiful transformations we witness during their week with us.  We see the stress, the responsibilities, the worries of the world peel off weary shoulders day by enchanted day.  At the end of their trip, most women are glowing with a new found vibrancy and zest for life.”

Our 2010 Women's Week group in Provence

Whether you’re a woman traveling on your own or with a friend, sister, mother or daughter, an all-women’s tour could be just the trip you’ve always dreamed of! Or think about the special women in your life; this might also be the ideal type of trip for them.
 

Kathy Wood and her husband Charley lead European Experiences, week-long “slow tours” in some of the most beautiful areas of Europe, including The Luberon Experience in Provence, France. In 2012 they’ll host groups in the Luberon, the Chianti region of Tuscany, and the Salzkammergut region of Austria.

Kathy and Charley have been traveling in Europe for 20 years and love sharing their special places in Europe with other travelers. Read more about Kathy and Charley here.

Slow Travel Tours is an affiliation of small-group tour operators who offer personalized trips in Italy, France and other European countries.

Francesca converted an old hay barn into two self-catering apartments and a double room, incorporating at the same time a magic spell. Although the accommodation is rustic, everyone who stays is entranced. The upper apartment has witnessed several proposals of marriage with the couples returning for their honeymoons. Some of my clients who I brought only for a brief honey tasting under the cherry tree have declared they never want to leave, regretting their choice of a hotel in Lucca.

Is it the stupendous view of Barga from the swimming pool?

Is it the rare breed chickens in their feather hats?

Is it Dido sneaking into the kitchen looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth?

Maybe it’s Francesca preparing to catch a swarm of bees?

It could be the pizza party Francesca throws once a week for her guests and invites her friends and relations (many of whom speak English) making the guests feel as if they too have friends in Italy.

Sometimes my clients make the pizza dough and sometimes Francesca buys the dough from the baker. One time we stopped for lunch on the way to Al Benefizio with the dough in a refrigerator bag. It was so hot that day that the dough rose too fast and burst out of the bag threatening to engulf the car, and I had to grapple it back into the bag and make it behave.

We help light the oven around 5 pm so it has time to heat up by the time the first focaccia is put in to test the temperature at around 7.30.

From then on it’s fantasy time. There are loads of toppings

and you can create your own, or you can drink and chat and eat whatever comes from the oven.

If you stay till the end there’s a surprise dessert: chocolate pizza!

Heather Jarman invites you on inspiring culinary tours of life behind the scenes that you won’t find in any guidebook — get to know the food artisans and craftspeople of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont and Liguria. Come join me and my Italian friends and dip into a lifestyle where lunch is more important than business. Find out more at Sapori e Saperi Adventures and follow Heather’s own adventures on her blog.

Slow Travel Tours is an affiliation of small-group tour operators who offer personalized trips in Italy, France and other European countries.

Another surprise is the weight of a frame with a honeycomb full of honey. First our guests hold an empty frame and then Francesca hands them a full one, taking the precaution of not letting go until they’ve demonstrated that they’re strong enough to hold it on their own — especially important with young children. How much do you think it weighs?

Next we get to help scrape the wax caps off the cells in the honeycomb and taste the honey.

Pure acacia honey is colourless and delicately sweet. In our area beekeepers try to keep it separate from the other types of honey. As soon as they see the acacia flowers dying and dropping from the trees, they remove the supers from the hive so the bees can’t add nectar from other flowers. After helping Francesca extract the honey from the comb, we relax in the shade of her cherry tree for a spuntino (snack) of cheese, bread and honey. Francesca also collects chestnut honey. The chestnut tree flowers from mid-June and the honey is brown and has an attractive bitter edge to its sweetness. A recent custom here is to combine honey and cheese: sweet acacia with the citrusy flavour of fresh pecorino (sheep’s milk cheese) and chestnut with stronger-tasting mature pecorino.

While munching meditatively and contemplating the splendid view of Barga across the valley, I came up with the idea of combining these three country foods in a single week-long tour, and so the ‘CHEESE + BREAD + HONEY’ tour was born. The first one just took place. We stayed in an idyllic, peaceful former monastery, enjoying cushier amenities than the original Franciscans. The tour started with a summer solstice village festival and included making bread in a wood-fired oven with a village baker, a day at a farm watching mamma make pecorino and ricotta followed by lunch and the visit to Francesca to learn about honey, plus walks in the mountains and much more. Next year’s tour will take place from 17–24 June 2012.

Heather Jarman invites you on inspiring culinary tours of life behind the scenes that you won’t find in any guidebook — get to know the food artisans and craftspeople of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont and Liguria. Come join me and my Italian friends and dip into a lifestyle where lunch is more important than business. Find out more at Sapori e Saperi Adventures and follow Heather’s own adventures on her blog.

Slow Travel Tours is an affiliation of small-group tour operators who offer personalized trips in Italy, France and other European countries.

The portico of the Uffizi in a rare quiet moment

Florence is one of the main tourist destinations in Italy. Travelers from all over the world flock there making for a bit of a crush. One of Florence’s main draws is its wealth of high Rennaisance art and its two museum stars are the Uffizi and Accademia museums.

There are many attractions in Florence where, although there are always crowds, the wait time will not be interminable, however the Uffizi and Accademia are another story. If you just show up at the door to puchase an entry ticket for these institutions you will be relegated to the end of a long, and I do mean LONG, line where waiting time can extend for hours.

For a modest additional fee it is possible to purchase advance tickets for a specific entry time for these and other Florence museums through an official website. This site charges a modest fee (currently 4 euros for the Uffizi) in addition to the standard museum admission fee, but the time saved and convenience should be well worth the cost.

The website can be set to the English language and is fairly straightforward and easy to understand and use. Payment can be made online via major credit cards and an email confirmation for the specific time that you request (if available) will be sent to you by email. When you arrive at the museum you will need to look for an entrance on the opposite side of the court from the main entry point. This is where you will pick up your ticket. You will still likely have a line to wait on, but it is modest compared to the throngs on the other line for those without advance tickets.

I am a firm believer in the benefits of slow travel and I like to keep my itineraries modest and loose, but when visiting the main Florence museums a bit of advance planning is clearly an advantage.

You may click on this link for the museum site or paste the url into your browser.  http://www.b-ticket.com/b-ticket/uffizi/default.aspx

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Matthew Daub is a professional artist and university professor with works in major public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. He has been leading plein air painting workshops in Italy since 1994. In 1999, Matthew and his wife Barbara formed Arts Sojourn as “a vacation for artists and their friends.” The program is designed to appeal to artists of all levels as well as non-artists who enjoy the company of creative people in a slow travel format.

A hilltop village

If you’ve been to the mountains of Italy, I bet you’ve asked this question yourself. You’re probably in a car on a road hugging a river and you’re craning your neck to look up at a terracotta-roofed village improbably balanced on an inaccessible ridge. To find the answer you have to abandon your car, get into your time-machine, key in ‘Middle Ages’ and click GO. With no discomfort on the way, you find yourself on a broad cobbled road nearly at the crest of the ridge looking down at that very spot in the valley you just vacated. You see the river running swiftly in the shadow of sheer rock walls that not even a mountain goat could scamper across. Your car is nowhere to be seen, because the road won’t be cut through the rock for several centuries. Your eyes follow the river to the left where it emerges from the gorge, still in the shade at noon, and disappears into a thicket of dense scrub on a river plain that floods in winter. You walk next to your mule laden with your jeans, T-shirts and iPod and in five minutes emerge into full sunshine at the ospedale next to the church in the village, where you are welcomed by a monk and offered a meal. As you tuck into your succulent boiled salt pork ribs, a large bowl of tasty chestnut-flour polenta and a skin of wine, you’re cooled by a soft mountain breeze that ripples through the golden farro in small terraced fields. A couple of enormous black pigs with pink belts around their middles wallow in a puddle formed by the spring that issues from higher up the mountain and provides clean cold drinking and washing water for the village. It must have been hard work creating the terraces, but the place is swarming with strapping young sons who look as if they’ve been down the gym pumping iron all morning, and it’s obvious time isn’t in short supply either. After lunch you’re not allowed to depart before having a snooze on a bed of hay in the inn, air-conditioned by the thick stone walls.

Arriving at the mediaeval village

Although you’ve signed up for a Slow Travel Tour, you still have to get to the next village by evening. A shepherd setting out with his flock offers to accompany you and show you the way, not that you need help to follow the broad, well-maintained mule track bordered by dry-stone walls. He’s been visiting his sister who married one of the men in this village, and his aunt and uncle live here too. There are many family connections between adjacent villages on this slope and those just over the top behind the village. It’s all so convenient living right on the main mule track; nothing is much more than an hour’s walk away. As you amble along, he tells you that the village you’re heading for lies just below a fort, part of the Republic of Lucca’s line of defense against the warmongering Florentine Republic. The ridge serves as an ideal lookout point, but the garrisoned troops are always drunk, and he’s sure those sheep that went missing provided Sunday lunch for the officers. Besides, he lowers his voice conspiratorially, he and a couple of other shepherds, who know the tops of the mountains like the eagles, had a good trade in contraband chestnut flour and firewood with the Florentine citizens just over the border. All at an end now, of course. After about 50 minutes, at a fork in the road, the shepherd bids you farewell as he continues up to his house in the summer pasture half an hour away and you saunter down the slope to the village bar just in time for a gin and tonic and a pizza margherita. Oops! You must have accidentally hit the ESC key on the time machine. You can tell because they didn’t have tomatoes in mediaeval times, and there are those telltale electric fairy-lights in the bar garden. Oh well, now that you’re back, let’s do the return trip as a 21^st-century hiker.

Bridge along a mule track

The mule track, being inaccessible even by a Fiat Panda 4×4, has become overgrown, many of the cobbles have washed out and in places no trace is left. No matter. You shoulder your rucksack and set off down the tarmac road to the valley bottom, which takes 45 minutes. Turn left and walk along the state highway cut into the sides of the valley or raised above the boggy valley bottom. The sun finally got here at about 12.30 pm, the tarmac is still blazing hot and there’s no cooling mountain breeze down here. An hour later you arrive at a village in the valley bottom, built mostly since the 1950s to be near the factories that exploit the river water. Turn left and for another hour and a quarter climb steadily following the interminable switchbacks of the car road, built in the late ‘50s, to arrive after a grand total of 3 hours back where you had lunch. QED. Where did that mule go?

Another idyllic hilltop village

Heather Jarman invites you on inspiring culinary tours of life behind the scenes that you won’t find in any guidebook — get to know the food artisans and craftspeople of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont and Liguria. Come join me and my Italian friends and dip into a lifestyle where lunch is more important than business. Find out more at Sapori e Saperi Adventures and follow Heather’s own adventures on her blog.

Slow Travel Tours is an affiliation of small-group tour operators who offer personalized trips in Italy, France and other European countries.

Tuscany is usually all about vines and olive trees, winding roads and pencil cypresses, everything bathed in bright sunshine. A lesser known fact is that Tuscany has a proper winter with rain, snow and cold. Even less known are the joys of winter: Befana, Carnival, walking and skiing, wood-burning stoves and winter soups. Celebrations, landscapes and food unimaginable in the overheated summer. For the seeker after the real Tuscany, there are fewer tourists and more Tuscans. A happy by-product is lower prices.

Look what we picked

November is the rainiest month in Tuscany, but it’s also the month of the olive harvest and chestnut roasts. You can pick olives on Claudio’s organic farm, take them to the olive press and come away with a bottle of your own oil. Until 60 years ago, chestnut flour was the ‘bread’ of mountain inhabitants, and some older people continue the art of drying chestnuts. We walk to the chestnut-drying hut in chestnut woods with spectacular views that are obscured in summer by dense foliage. We visit the centuries-old water mill where the chestnuts are ground. Chestnut festivals are the perfect opportunity for a visitor to participate in rural culture. The best is in a hilltop village where a variety of chestnut dishes are served in courtyards and front rooms throughout the village. Men in lumberjack shirts sit around a huge bed of coals on the hillside roasting chestnuts that you can buy in a paper bag for a Euro.

Chestnut festival

This year winter proper began with the first snowfall at the end of November. Cars topped with skis hastened up my valley to the ski resort of Abetone. One of the best weekends of the year is the first one in December when you can catch the chestnut festival at Castelnuovo and the chocolate festival at Barga at the same time as doing your Christmas shopping in Lucca at Desco — an art, craft and artisan food fair in a 13th-century monastery. You can still pick olives with Claudio and taste the new oil. Artichokes are a winter vegetable in Italy. They’re small, usually without a choke and a beautiful chianti colour. They’re so tender you can eat them raw in a salad or, my favourite, thinly sliced on tagliata, a rare T-bone steak grilled over a wood fire. Cardoons appear now too; a cousin of the artichoke, but instead of eating the flower, you eat the leaf stalks.

Artichokes & cardoons (at back)

Nearer to Christmas, villages begin staging ‘presepi viventi’, which means ‘living crèche’. You don’t have to be religious to enjoy entering the stone gate of a fortified mediaeval village and finding yourself in another age. You might at first confuse it with Disneyland, but this isn’t a commercial fabrication for tourists. The villagers have worked for days to transform their cellars into artisan workshops where teenage boys make wooden agricultural tools and grannies make lace; the old schoolroom is filled with children dressed up in their grandparents’ childhood clothing writing on slates by candlelight; a street stall is hung with small game; mulled wine simmers over a wood fire and 19th-century bloomers hang on a washing line. In the cobbled streets lit by flares a choir sings accompanied by an accordionist. Several food stalls ensure you won’t go hungry.

Mulled wine

On the night of 5 January or Twelfth Night, the good witch Befana rides her broom delivering presents to children. In my village we process from house to house singing a song about Befana. In return for the presents we bring, the householders give a donation which is used for improvements to the village. December and January were the traditional months for killing the family pig and making prosciutto, salami, sausages, head cheese and blood pudding. It’s still a good time to visit a family butcher and see how father, brother, sisters and son continue to do it in the age-old way. The annual Slow Food soup tournament takes place in January and February. We can join the members of the public who judge six zuppe made by six different cooks on six Saturday nights and then choose the champion in a run-off of the six winners. You can forage for the wild greens that are an essential component of zuppa alla frantoiana and can be found in fields and stone walls from December to March.

Family making soppressata

If winter is seeming a bit long and dull by the time February arrives, Carnival soon brightens the scene. Carnival is an important celebration in many countries and is the time to eat up all the feast food prohibited during Lent. People dress up in costumes and dance in the streets. In Italy the Viareggio Carnival parade is second only to Venice. Just a few kilometres from Pisa and Lucca you can spend a day on the passegiata along the seafront watching the political satire floats as they pass by, dressed in costumes or not as you like and eating cacciuco, the famous Viareggio seafood stew.

Carnival parade, Viareggio

Since Easter is late this year, Carnival spills over into March. Sicilian blood oranges are still in the shops and wild boar stew on restaurant menus, but there’s a hint of spring in the air. We attend an international camelia festival in a village bedecked by red, pink and white 18th-century camelia trees and, surprisingly in this land of coffee, have a tea tasting at the experimental tea plantation. Tea leaves come from Camellia sinensis. Olive oil has been settling since November and is now ready to be bottled and shown off at another village festival. With less chance of snow, we can venture up to the high Garfagnana and learn to bake potato bread in a wood-fired oven with the village baker.

My own loaf

So pack your warm clothes and umbrella and come to Tuscany when it’s really itself.

Heather Jarman invites you on inspiring culinary tours of life behind the scenes that you won’t find in any guidebook — get to know the food artisans and craftspeople of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont and Liguria. Come join me and my Italian friends and dip into a lifestyle where lunch is more important than business. Find out more at Sapori e Saperi Adventures and follow Heather’s own adventures on her blog.

Slow Travel Tours is an affiliation of small-group tour operators who offer personalized trips in Italy, France and other European countries.

You would think this question a no-brainer: no guide, no cost. Picking up Bill Steiner’s last blog on the theme of the paradoxes of slow travel, you can pay a high price if you travel without the guidance of people who know your chosen destination. Never having been on an organized tour before setting up my own company, I’m not a great advertisement for what I’m writing. However, now that I’ve lived in the area around Lucca for six years and guided many travellers around it, I realise what I was missing when I headed off on my own. There was of course the sense of being an explorer and the thrill of discovering something new for myself. But what if I had missed that amazing little restaurant that’s not even in Beth Elon’s inspiring A Culinary Traveller in Tuscany: Exploring & Eating off the Beaten Track? Or missed the spectacular scenery and artisanal food of the Garfagnana, which gets scant mention in guidebooks?

I frequently help travellers standing forlornly on a street corner staring at a map or looking around helplessly. There was the time in Castelnuovo Garfagnana when I overheard a group discussing where they could find a good restaurant, and I directed them to the best in the Garfagnana just 10 minutes’ walk from where they stood, but unnoticed by them.

What got me thinking about this was dinner last night with a couple of American WWOOFers (Workers on Organic Farms) who had taken time off the farm to stay in the Cinque Terre, one of the more visited spots in Italy and well-covered by guidebooks. No need to pay for a guide, you would have thought. They had a recommendation for a restaurant but arrived to find it closed. After their seafood dinner around the corner, the husband was violently ill and was still off fish three weeks later. Too late, I suggested they should have gone to the excellent restaurant just outside the village, where I had taken my group in October. ‘If only we had known you before we went’, they wailed. It seems a knowledgeable guide is even more necessary in places that attract many tourists, since restaurants soon learn that, not having to rely on repeat business, they can get away with serving sub-standard food, and shopkeepers profit more from selling portable mass-produced souvenirs than local goods.

Returning to Bill’s blog, he links the quality of experience to spending more time in one place, but I notice that the trips last just one week. This is much more than the usual few hours or even a couple of days allocated by many travellers, but I think he’s modestly left out an important element. Without Kristi and him to guide them, I suspect their guests would have missed some of the most exciting details of Orvieto.

Unless you’re lucky enough to have a year to spend getting to know a place, slow travel deserves a guide whose local knowledge and enthusiasm can make every minute of your trip more enjoyable and valuable.

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Heather Jarman helps you discover the hidden culinary treasures of Lucca in northwest Tuscany. You can join me for a day, a week or as long as you like. Find out more at Sapori e Saperi Adventures and follow Heather’s own adventures on her blog.

Sapori e Saperi Adventures

Gemma making pecorino cheese

Yesterday I made pesto with the basil leaves remaining on my end-of-summer basil plants. I knew it would only be a crude Tuscan imitation of the refined Ligurian original, one province to the north of Tuscany. I’d learned from Alessandra, a cooking teacher I use for my tours, whose grandparents are from Genoa, the capital of Liguria, that the flavour of Ligurian basil is more delicate than our basil. She once managed to find in Lucca some basil imported from Liguria, and the pesto she taught us was an entirely different, more balanced sauce. The basil didn’t dominate the pine nuts, parmesan and olive oil (the more delicately flavoured Ligurian variety, of course). She warned of the futility of buying Ligurian seeds and growing them here; they turn into Tuscan basil — it must be our soil or climate or both. If you want to taste authentic Ligurian pesto, you have to go to Liguria and find someone who makes it herself.

Francesca deals with a swarm of bees

I don’t have a food processor, so I make pesto by hand in a mortar. Marcella Hazan gives the recipe and technique. She recommends putting the whole leaves, garlic cloves, pine nuts and salt into the mortar, and ‘Using the pestle with a rotary movement, grind all the ingredients against the side of the mortar. When they have been ground into a paste…’ The first time I tried this, after 20 minutes of nearly continuous, grueling grinding, the leaves still hadn’t been reduced to a paste. Now I chop everything first using a mezzaluna and then grind it in the mortar. But every time I wonder whether Marcella’s recipe is wrong (she was born in Emilia Romagna, not Liguria), whether I have the wrong type of mortar and pestle or whether my grinding technique is wrong or what. Watching YouTube helps a little; finding recipes helps but frustrates. The recipe from the Cosortium of Genoese Pesto romanticises about the touch of the artist. Obviously, I need to find the artist. Not a famous chef whose personality will be stamped all over his pesto, but a commoner, like the man who won this year’s Pesto World Cup, a pharmacist from Genoa.

Severino, the pork butcher

One of my clients understood perfectly. It was her family’s first trip to Italy, and I would have expected them to be doing the Coliseum on Monday, Michelangelo’s David on Tuesday, the Leaning Tower of Pisa on Wednesday and Venice on Thursday. My heart leapt when she said: ‘I told my travel agent we didn’t want to visit anything we could see on the internet. We wanted to get to know Italians and how they live in their own country.’ That’s what slow travel is about.

(The photos show some of the people you can meet in my territory around Lucca in Tuscany.)

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Heather Jarman helps you discover the hidden culinary treasures of Lucca in northwest Tuscany. You can join me for a day, a week or as long as you like. Try to include a weekend so you can come to a sagra. Find out more at Sapori e Saperi Adventures and follow Heather’s own adventures on her blog.

Sapori e Saperi Adventures

August is party time in the villages of Italy. Posters advertising festas or sagras sprout from trees and lampposts; leaflets pile up in bars and tourist information offices. A festa was originally a solemn religious festival and sagra derives from sacra meaning sacred, but both have morphed into excuses for high spirits and enjoyment. My friends call me a sagra junkie, and I admit I can’t stay away. Most serve good food cooked by the people of the village, but only one I’ve been to so far started with a blessing of motorcycles before the supper accompanied by folk musicians and dancers.

Tonight I can choose among twelve different ones in the Garfagnana alone, which is a tiny part of Tuscany north of Lucca. There’s the ‘Sagra della porchetta’ — a meal based around succulent herby roast pork and served in the sports ground of Villetta.

But the view will be more spectacular from Trassillico, a village balanced on a razor-edge ridge in the shadow of a fifteenth-century fort, which serves Garfagnana biroldo (our sensuously spiced blood sausage) with creamy polenta.

The ‘Sagra della trota’, a menu based on trout from clear mountain rivers sounds enticing too. If I’m feeling homesick for England, I could scoff some fish and chips at Barga. Or maybe I should choose one of the three mediaeval festivals, such as ‘I banditi dell’Ariosto all’ora di Cena’ (‘The bandits of Ariosto at dinner’), where the mountain village is romantically lit by flares, the inhabitants are dressed in mediaeval costumes and each course is served in a different courtyard of the village. As the sun sets and lights begin to twinkle in the valley far below, a band of rowdy brigands bursts in through an arch and demands payment, but is bribed with wine and good food to join the company of diners. This probably sounds embarrassing to Anglo-Saxons, but the villagers are as unselfconscious as if they were wearing jeans and horsing around with their friends in the bar.

I love to include village festivals in my tours, partly because they’re fun, but also because they’re the opposite of a tourist attraction. These are parties the people of the village throw for themselves — the permanent inhabitants, the émigrés who return to their ancestral homes for the summer and the few foreigners who have bought houses in the village or are staying at a nearby agriturismo. One of my sagra calendars says, ‘Now is the time to rejoice with our people. Popular traditions are the essence of a community, the spirit that, throughout time, remains alive and is transmitted from one generation to the next’. Children are important. At parties they learn effortlessly about the best things from their past.

But Stefano Baccelli, the President of Lucca Province, comes closest to what I feel: ‘The occasion may be an art show, a theatre production, a local folklore event, the passion for artisan crafts or our traditional flavours. In the end, the motivation is of little importance: the thing that counts is the desire for a voyage, for discovery, the will to re-establish a profound dialogue with our history, our traditions, our landscape. If you share this with us, you cross “bridges” and enjoy the journey: welcome back on the human planet.’

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Heather Jarman helps you discover the hidden culinary treasures of Lucca in northwest Tuscany. You can join me for a day, a week or as long as you like. Try to include a weekend so you can come to a sagra. Find out more at Sapori e Saperi Adventures and follow Heather’s own adventures on her blog.