Boutique Journeys Through Italy and Its Borders

In the late nineteenth century, workers began hollowing vast brick vaults into the tuff beneath the hill town of Canelli in Piemonte, and in those underground halls the first Italian sparkling wine was made. The cellars are still open, the bottles still rest on the same racks, and a visit today is one of the anchors of the routes described on this site. Every journey we run is built around places like that: a cellar, a fortress, an island garden or a medieval oven that you can still stand in front of, taste from and walk through.

The rice plains that look like another continent

Before the wine hills come into view, the roads west of Milan cross flooded fields. Italy grows more rice than any other country on the continent, roughly a million and a half tonnes a year, and the best of it, the Arborio and Carnaroli varieties that every risotto in the country depends on, comes from these Piemonte plains. In summer, when the water mirrors the sky, the paddies look more Asian than Alpine, and the rice farms are often elegant historic mansions rather than plain farm buildings. One of them, used as a set for the 1950s neorealist film classic about rice field workers, still welcomes visitors who come to learn how the grain is grown, milled and cooked.

The island built like a galleon

On Lake Maggiore, four hundred years of architects, stucco workers, painters and cabinet makers turned a bare rock into Isola Bella, a terraced garden that its founder intended to look like a ship floating on the water. It still does. On neighbouring Isola Madre, the largest of the lake islands, botanical collections thrive in the mild climate all year round. Both islands sit within easy reach of the resort town of Stresa, and a day spent between them usually ends with lake fish in a family-run dining room.

Stone cones and baroque facades

In the far south, the landscape keeps its own records. The conical trulli houses of Alberobello, now a UNESCO world heritage site, were built dry-stone so they could be dismantled quickly, and hundreds of them still crown the hilltop streets. Further south, Lecce and Otranto trade in a different material: Lecce stacks its honey-soft baroque facades above Roman ruins, while Otranto guards a mosaic floor that pilgrims have crossed for centuries. Between them lies Matera, where cave dwellings carved into a ravine stayed inhabited into the twentieth century and are now among the most visited sites in southern Italy.

A saying repeated across eastern Sicily holds that the island is a continent in miniature, and the same could be said of a week spent between Piemonte, Puglia and the borderlands of the north east.

Three countries in one week

The northern routes cross borders the way earlier centuries did, by valley and by port rather than by checkpoint. A week can begin in Habsburg Trieste, with its coffee houses where writers once wrote, move down the Istrian coast to the Venetian lanes of Rovinj and the Roman amphitheatre of Pula, climb to the truffle forests of Motovun, and finish through Slovenian hills, the emerald Soca river and the Roman mosaics of Aquileia. Family wineries and olive groves punctuate the drive on both sides of each border.

• Underground sparkling wine cathedrals beneath Canelli, open for guided tastings
• The Borromeo islands of Lake Maggiore, a garden four centuries in the making
• The trulli of Alberobello and the cave districts of Matera in the south
• Habsburg cafes, Istrian fish markets and Lombard mosaics along the north eastern border

How these routes are run

Each itinerary is built for a group of no more than six travellers, led by a single expert who drives, cooks, translates and tells the stories, and every departure can be scheduled on the dates that suit you. Producers open their tables because the groups are small enough to sit around them. The pages that follow set out each week in practical detail, from the airport you land at to the cheese you will taste on day two. Pick the region that calls first, and the rest of the country will follow.