We’ve been surprised to receive several client queries just in the past few days - after the holidays, people apparently start thinking about new travel experiences for 2025.

And it’s definitely not too soon to start planning a trip to Italy or Ireland - we can make yoiur sream itineray like we have for so many other travelers!

To broaden our knowledge base for our itinerary service, we recently took a 12-day jaunt up into Italy’s northern Lakes regions - with a couple of stops in Emilia-Romagna on the way.

Here’s a roundup of some of the special and extraordinary places where we stayed and ate. Although our Alpine Lakes guide is the slimmest volume of our guidebooks, these lakes are chock full of natural beauty and deep history. And now we have even more information to share with our travelers!

October has been an especially busy time for us, capping off a record-breaking travel season. This month, we’ve had as many as 5 different groups of travelers on the road at the same time in both Ireland and Italy – each following a unique itinerary that we crafted for them. Some of them have sent us photos, which they’ve permitted us to post here.

The experiences include pecorino farm tours and tastings, cashmere goat walks, outdoor art installations, Chianti cooking class, – not to mention endless beautiful scenery and delicious local food!

Here are a few sets of photos that we’ve received from our happy travelers…

We read with interest a recent article in WaPo that highlights the effect of so-called “influencers” in one of the most heavily touristed areas in Italy. It's a starkly realistic picture of the tourist scene on the Amalfi Coast – a picture that is, by the way, decidedly NOT what visitors are hoping to find after watching "The Talented Mr Ripley" or clicking through Tik-Tok travel videos. 

The article prompted us as Little Roads Europe to codify our own thoughts, as travel planners about tourism (and over-tourism), and about the reasons travelers want to do the things they do – and how “influencers” encourage tourism that’s detrimental to the places they purport to promote.

A lot of travelers contact us who say they want us to plan an itinerary for them to go to both Ireland and Scotland. The fact is, the two are not necessarily interchangeable – there are differences in the logistics and in the experiences; and to traverse from one to the other could easily eat up an entire travel day.