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ITALY 2015 TOUR No. 1

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March 5, 2017

In September, 2015, I led two tours back-to-back in Italy, starting in Venice and moving to Tuscany before continuing on to Puglia (in the heel of Italy) for the final days.

When we decided to launch this tour, we told our booking agent that we were only interested in doing one tour, even though we realized it might be popular. My instructions to him was: “Take the first 35 people to sign on and then say it is fully booked.”

What happened was that when people called, he told them: “Which tour would you like – the first one, starting Sept. 10, or the second one, starting Sept 27.”

As a result, we ended up doing back-to-back tours which meant doing the whole thing twice: not a bad thing by any means but extremely tiring as each tour requires a massive amount of physical and emotional energy.

Nevertheless, these tours were a huge success and we had fabulous people on each one – a sadness for me that some of them never got to meet one another when I knew very well that they would love meeting and partying together.

The first group arrived in Venice in early September. We travelled by boat from the airport to the hotel. This was a wonderful introduction to Venice as our hotel was located in the heart of the city just off the Grand Canal.

In Venice, we did a walking tour, seeing all the key sights, and we also took a boat out of the city and went to Villa Foscari la Malcontenta, the iconic Palladio-designed villa with its lovely garden.

We had time to spend some fun nights in Venice, especially in Piazza San Marco where we enjoyed music and champagne. Very memorable.

From Venice, we moved to Florence in Tuscany, stopping on the way, first, at Padua for coffee and to see St. Anthony’s basilica and walk the town’s lovely circular piazza with its myriad of statues, and then in to Bologna for lunch and a little walkabout.

I like to talk about this day a lot because I cannot imagine a more exciting day that one where you start it in Venice and then stop for coffee in Padua and then lunch in Bologna and ended up having dinner in Florence. What a superb day in anyone’s book.

In Florence, we visited two of my favourite gardens, Villa Gamberaia in the hillside village of Settignano, and Palazzo Corsini al Prato in the heart of Florence.

Out of Florence, we went to Lucca to visit Palazzo Pfanner and see its lovely garden as well as walk the streets and walls of the city that gave us Puccini.

In Florence, there was time to shop and go to museums like the Uffizi and to see all the other sights, including the Duomo and the Ponte Vecchio and to walk the Oltrarno district.

From Florence, we moved down to Siena, from where we visited San Gimignano and Volterra, where we enjoyed delightful farmhouse lunches with lots of wine.

In Siena, we toured the town and visited the famous fan-shaped Piazza del Campo, location of the city’s famous annual horse race as well as its monumental Gothic town hall, Palazzo Pubblico.

Saying goodbye to Siena, we travelled to Pisa where we visited the Leaning Tower and the cathedral and Piazza dei Miracoli as well as the botanic garden. After lunch, we went to the airport and got a flight to Bari on the Adriatic in Puglia, for a complete change of pace.

Here, we had a fun pizza night as well as a wonderful city tour where we visited Basilica di San Nicola and the old quarter and got to see some first-class pasta making.

From Bari, we travelled down the coast, popping into Polignano a Mare and on to Alberobello where we had lunch and enjoyed time wandering around the area full of quaint cone-shaped whitewashed trulli houses, definitive of this region.

We also stopped at Locorotondo to buy some wine before continuing on to our base in Lecce.

After spending a day seeing the town and its fabulous cathedral and beautiful streets and shopping district, we visited Matera in Basilicata, a town famous (or infamous) for its history of extreme poverty and its honeycomb network of cave dwellings called Sassi.

Matera has such an ancient look, it has often been used as the setting for biblical stories, such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ.

From Lecce, we also visited a special garden, La Cutura, and the coastal town of Otranto, famous for its 15th century castle and 11th century cathedral.

Leaving Lecce, we moved to our final destination, Ostuni, the “white city” because of the dominance of whitewashed buildings in the old town, covering the entire hillside.

From here, after various parties, luncheons and dinners, we said our farewells and went to Brindisi where the group got their flights home to Vancouver.

swhysall@hotmail.com