Our latest research trip to Ireland (August 2026) was chock full of great food. All of our itinerary clients that come to Italy tell us they are coming, in large part, for the food. But few of our itinerary clients headed to Ireland list food as a priority. That is a shame — they should! We focus on food in Ireland as much as we do in Italy, obviously just with a different bent. Classic dishes and inventive new plates: Roasted chicken, sausages, beef stew, and more kinds of seafood than you can imagine.

We can't sit down to a meal without our cats pestering us and begging. When we let them try what we're eating, they inevitably reject it - though they still keep begging!

So, on our recent 2-week trip to Chianti (for which we brought the cats with us!), we collected a bunch of fine Italian foods for our cats - from parmigiano-reggiano to Chianti-braised beef to Tuscan salami and prosciutto - as well as a few foodstuffs from elsewhere.

Their responses to our offerings were... predictable.

We started spending a couple of weeks in Chianti – with our cats! – a few years ago, when we had organized several musical events in that area within a short time period.

This year, we decided to do something different: We cleared our calendar for two weeks to just enjoy a cool pool in this beautiful place, without any musical work whatsoever. So we packed up our cats and all of their stuff, and a few things of our own, and we drove up to Tuscany for a two-week stay in Greve in Chianti.

We recently returned from a 10-day research trip in some of the northern regions of Italy, much of which we spent exploring several of its wonderful subalpine lakes. We use this fact-finding to increase our breadth of knowledge, adding to the offerings to our client travelers who engage our itinerary crafting services.

Baking here in Italy is very different than it was in the US. The products are different (baking powder, flour, butter), so something I learned shortly after we moved here is that I couldn’t reliably turn out cakes and cookies like I used to in Nashville.