Gastronomic Adventures for Families

Step into an unmodern world, unwind and renew the quality of your family life while gaining new skills you can take home. You and your children can experience cooking and eating as a family, while staying in a small village or smallholding. Set in the spectacular Garfagnana, where the food is as sublime as the views, you share the locals’ delight in food in all its aspects — from growing to eating it along with local wine and beer. There are loads of different activities at different seasons that can be enjoyed by any age. Suitable for parents (single or couples) and children over 5 years.

Special Offers

Exclusive 5% off Gastronomic Adventures: Save an exclusive 5% on Family Gastronomic Adventure Trips with partners Sapori e Saperi. What's more, you will receive free and hard to find pasta cutters, so your family's culinary adventure can continue on your return home. Call or email Sapori e Saperi to find out more, or create a tailored family adventure, and quote 'Take the Family.' (Flights are not included.)

When

Trips departing: Spring half term 27 – 31 May 2008 (4 nights, limited availability) or throughout the summer months. You can call or email to tell them when you want your adventure to start and for how long you want it to last. Email: info@sapori-e-saperi.com.

Stay

Sapori e Saperi check availability of suitable accommodation in the Garfagnana about 50 minutes north of Lucca. If two families want to go at the same time, they will place you at the same agriturismo (accommodation on a farm) and plan a programme suitable for the whole group. Options include: village house — no swimming pool, but an excellent public pool in Bagni di Lucca (15-minute drive — transport provided), or a converted farmhouse (with swimming pool). Pisa is the nearest airport and about half an hour from Lucca.

Price

from €700 to €800 per adult or child for a 4 night adventure or from €1200 to €1400 per adult or per child in summer for a 6 night adventure. Price includes, accommodation, most meals, refreshment and local wine or beer, and transfers.

Itinerary

There are loads of different activities at different seasons that can be enjoyed by families of any age. Here’s a sample:: - Cooking lessons with young Italian mammas — learn to make pasta by hand and lots of other traditional dishes that are easy to make with your children at home with the bonus of a healthy meal to enjoy with friends and family.; - Develop the confidence to improvise without a recipe using the ingredients you have to hand.; - Swim.; - Pick wild bilberries (blueberries) and make jam in July. Pick olives and make olive oil in October.; - Watch Renato make sausages and then BBQ them for dinner.; - Paint the mountain scenery, the wildflowers, the sunset.; - Mingle with Italian families at one of the many village festivals celebrating the food that makes them unique, for example, a type of crêpe made only in one village in the mountains or rosticciana and fagioli (the Garfagnana version of pork ribs and beans).; - Ride horses.; - Children organize a blind wine-tasting for their parents.; - Visit a beekeeper and watch her extract honey from the honeycomb — don’t worry, the bees stay at home in the hive — and taste the different flavours of honey, such as acacia, wildflower and chestnut, on cheese and locally baked bread.; - Walk in the woods to see the Cinta Senese pigs and piglets.; - Put on a concert (we’ll find out if anyone plays an instrument and suggest they bring it).; - Get off the ground in a woodland adventure park for children and adults (suspension bridges, rope ladders, and other exciting pathways connecting the tree trunks) and eat a picnic ‘tasting’ lunch of delicious local products.; - Get milk from the ‘mechanical cow’, a refrigerator that lives in a wooden hut and gives unpasturized milk when you press the button. A local dairy farmer fills her up twice a day.; - Keep a journal — in words or pictures — so you can share your adventures with your friends at home.
- GOLDEN RULE:: Taste everything — you might be surprised how good it is…!