Archive for the ‘italy’ Category

Take Me To Tuscany!

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

In our travels we often meet with private tour guides that we later recommend to our clients. Scot gave our family a terrific tour of the Vatican when we were in Rome in 2006. Scot and his wife Rina now offer personalized custom tours in Italy, specializing in the Tuscany area.

“Tuscany’s popularity grows every year, and we can’t complain about that!” Scot says.  “It’s an easy place to keep coming back to for so many reasons, from the breathtaking countryside drives to the great food to the fact that it’s well connected with Florence and Rome by train and road. We have plenty of thematic tours for tourists with an interest in a particular face of Italy: wine tours (guided visits to exclusive wineries, lunches in historic castles etc), tours that focus on the Etruscan culture, or ceramics, or Renaissance gardens and villas. And, of course we have tours to all the great art cities of Tuscany and Umbria: Siena, San Gimignano, Lucca, Pisa, Assisi, Perugia….”

Can you find us good places to eat?  “We do a lot of research to find exceptional food that doesn’t appear in the guidebooks,” Scot says, “little restaurants and trattorie which are a great value because you’re eating incredibly fresh and well-prepared food, in a beautiful setting, that you wouldn’t have found about otherwise.”

Sounds wonderful!  Read more of our interview with Scot and Rina here

.

See The World Before You Leave It

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006


by Tim Larison

Recently I was planning an international trip for a client of mine and she said “this is one place I want to see before I die.” She was in her 30’s in fine health, yet had a sense that we all have only so much time to pursue our dreams in this life.

The trip of a lifetime for me was our Italy trip in May 2006 (that’s me to the left with Anne and our sons Andrew and Josh at a familiar site in Rome). I am Italian and I always wanted to see Italy, which we did on my 50th birthday. My parents, who speak Italian fluently and had their parents immigrate to the U.S. from Italy, never visited Italy and are at an age now where International travel isn’t practical. “We wish we had visited Italy when we were younger,” my Mom recently told me.

Do you have a trip you have always wanted to take? I encourage you to consider taking that trip in 2007. Our two week Italy and Mediterranean cruise did stretch our budget a bit, but it was worth every penny as I will never forget the many fascinating sights we saw and the people we met. The memories from that trip will last a lifetime.

A travel agent friend of mine has a slogan on her business card, “See The World Before You Leave It” I believe in this motto, too. There are so many more interesting places in the World I want to visit. As 2006 draws to a close I’m exploring possibilities for another “dream” trip for my family in the summer of 2007!

A kid’s view of Italy

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006


by Andrew Larison (age 12)

(pictured on the left in his baseball hat with twin brother Josh at the Trevi Fountain in Rome, May 2006)

This is my view of Rome and basically the whole country of Italy. A lot of people think kids wouldn’t like Italy, but I did. Besides having no clue what anyone is saying it’s an awesome country.

I especially loved Italy because the tons of pasta and pizza they have there. They had any type of pizza you could think of and some you couldn’t even imagine. It was awesome to try all of the food; I even got gelato which is like ice cream Italian style. The food on the cruise ship is good too; well all of the food on the cruise ship is tasty.

Italy and its buildings were also very cool. I have no idea how many 50 story churches we went into. On the houses they don’t have dryers so they just let their clothes sit outside while pigeons poop on them. Speaking of pigeons there are mobs of pigeons in most of the huge squares. Sometimes they land on people, and when they land on you, you’ll be sure the rest of them will be all over you. I saw this one lady screaming as she was covered with pigeons!!!!! One landed on Josh’s head, and he got all excited about that, giggling and said it tickled.

Also, there was a lot of gross pictures and statues in Italy. Its like if some guy was walking down the street naked no one would notice. Every one we yelped at, our mom would just laugh and tell us they didn’t care about that stuff. Especially that David guy, he’s the worst.

Soccer is a huge part of Italy; we went to Italy a few weeks before the world cup, in which they won. Every where kids are passing the ball around in the streets laughing and mumbling stuff in Italian. Some kids even wanted me to play after I passed the ball back to them when they lost it. Good times, Good times.

So as you can tell Italy has a great variety of stuff that kids can find fun. Oh yeah and if you want to go there book through my dad!