Viandando Luxury Travel

Viandando Luxury Travel Founded in Florence by an enthusiastic traveler and true Florentine, V is redefining the words ‘in

Founded in Florence by an enthusiastic traveler and true Florentine, Viandando is redefining the words ‘inbound tour operator’ by working with leisure clientele with the purpose of promoting a new philosophy of travel: The Unconventional Luxury.

"Where do you find your porcini?"You can ask an Italian about his salary, his politics, his marriage, even the details o...
01/09/2026

"Where do you find your porcini?"

You can ask an Italian about his salary, his politics, his marriage, even the details of a family feud that has been running since 1987. He will answer. He may even enjoy answering. But ask him where his mushroom spot is and something changes behind his eyes. The conversation is over.

The secrecy around porcini locations in Italy is not a joke. It is a cultural institution. Spots are passed from father to son. Men drive in deliberate circles before parking near a forest so that no one can follow them. Brothers do not tell brothers. Neighbors watch each other's movements in September the way cold war agents watched embassy staff. If an Italian invites you to come with him for porcini, you have received a greater honor than an invitation to his daughter's wedding.

September is when it starts. The first rains of autumn hit the warm ground and the Boletus edulis, the porcino, the "little pig," named for its fat stubby shape, begins pushing through the forest floor under chestnut and beech and oak trees across the Apennines. You cannot cultivate them. They grow where they decide to grow. The entire harvest is wild, foraged, carried out of the woods in wicker baskets by people who have been doing this since they could walk.

In Borgo Val di Taro, on the Emilian Apennines near Parma, the porcino carries an IGP designation, the only mushroom in Europe with protected geographical status. The local trade goes back to the 1600s. The annual fiera, now in its fiftieth edition, draws thousands. But the fiera is the public version. The real thing happens at dawn, alone, in a forest that smells of wet moss and bark, in complete silence.

We arrange this experience for our travelers. A local guide, a man who knows these woods because three generations of his family have walked them, takes you in at first light. You learn to read the forest floor. You find your first porcino. The guide nods. You have no idea why this feels like such an accomplishment, but it does.

Then lunch. What you picked that morning, sliced raw over a salad with shaved Parmigiano, or stirred into a risotto, or laid over fresh tagliatelle with nothing but butter. The time between forest floor and plate is about three hours.

This is September in Italy. If you want it, let us know.
https://viandandoluxurytravel.com/plan-your-trip/

*Visual imagined with AI — the real Italy is even better

Somewhere in Italy right now, at quarter to midnight, a child who should be asleep is ordering a second gelato. His gran...
28/08/2026

Somewhere in Italy right now, at quarter to midnight, a child who should be asleep is ordering a second gelato. His grandmother is letting him. It is August. School is two weeks away. The rules are different.

If you have never been in an Italian city after eleven at night in summer, you do not know what Italian cities are for.

The piazza that was a furnace at two in the afternoon is, by eleven, transformed. The tables are out. The fountain is surrounded by children in pajamas. The gelateria has a queue. Teenagers sit on the church steps. Fathers stand in small groups discussing something with great seriousness. Mothers sit at the tables discussing the same thing with greater accuracy. Dogs everywhere.

The pizzeria is cutting slices for people who already ate dinner but have rationalized that walking constitutes exercise. The bar is serving aperitivi to people who do not need another aperitivo but are in no hurry to leave because there is nowhere else to be.

This goes on until the first week of September. Then school starts, the piazzas empty by ten, and the four-year-old goes to bed at eight-thirty and cries about it.

But tonight the piazza is full. The grandfather has ordered himself a grappa and the child a third gelato and neither of them is thinking about September.

*Visual imagined with AI, the real Italy is even better

Every year, around this time, we get the same message.Someone writes to us in late August and says that they have been w...
25/08/2026

Every year, around this time, we get the same message.

Someone writes to us in late August and says that they have been watching our posts all summer and thinking about Italy, and they know it is probably too late for this year, and they are sorry for the short notice, and could we maybe do something for October.

The answer is almost always yes. And the secret we tell them is this: they are not late. They are, accidentally, perfectly on time.

September and early October are the finest weeks of the Italian year.

The temperature drops from the August extreme to something that feels designed for walking, warm enough for a linen shirt, cool enough that a long afternoon in a vineyard or a hilltop town is a pleasure and not an endurance test. The light changes. In August the Italian light is overhead, flat, white, unforgiving. In September it drops lower, turns gold, and begins arriving at the angle that made Caravaggio and Vermeer and every cinematographer in history fall in love with the Mediterranean. Buildings glow. Coastlines soften. The hour before sunset lasts what feels like forty-five minutes.

The sea is warmer in September than in June. It has been absorbing heat since May. The beaches that were shoulder-to-shoulder in August are half empty. The restaurant where you could not get a terrace table in July will seat you with a view and a glass of prosecco before you have finished asking.

The food reaches its second peak. Figs are perfectly ripe. The first porcini arrive from the mountain forests. The grape harvest begins in Chianti, in Montalcino, in Piedmont, in Franciacorta and the vineyards open their doors to visitors in a way they cannot do in the chaos of August. The tomatoes are at their deepest. The basil is still green. The light on a plate of food at an outdoor table at one in the afternoon is, frankly, worth the flight.

Here is the practical part.

We still have limited availability for September and the first half of October. It shrinks every week. What we can do in late August that we cannot do in June is move quickly, the best hotels and experiences hold a small number of rooms for late bookings, and after years of working with them we know which ones still have openings and which are gone.

If you have been thinking about Italy all summer, this is the message you were waiting to read. The window is open. It will not be open long.

One mail starts it -> [email protected]

*Visual imagined with AI — the real Italy is even better

Ischia is the largest island in the Bay of Naples. And it is sitting on top of a volcano.Monte Epomeo rises nearly eight...
18/08/2026

Ischia is the largest island in the Bay of Naples.
And it is sitting on top of a volcano.

Monte Epomeo rises nearly eight hundred meters from the center of the island. It has not erupted since the fourteenth century, but it is far from quiet. Below the surface, a geothermal system of extraordinary power heats a hundred and three separate thermal springs and sixty-nine fumarole fields. The island is warm from underneath. The beaches steam. The water in certain bays is thirty-eight degrees in August, heated not by the sun but by the earth.

The Greeks understood this before anyone. Ischia was the first Greek colony in the western Mediterranean, founded around 770 BC, before Naples, before Syracuse. They called it Pithecusa. They came for the volcanic soil. They stayed because the thermal waters healed their soldiers and eased the joints of men who had spent too long at sea.

The myth explains it differently: Zeus imprisoned the giant Tifeo under the island after defeating him in battle. The hot springs are his breath. The earthquakes are him turning in his sleep. The fumaroles, jets of volcanic steam that rise through the sand and bubble up through the shallows, are his anger, still simmering.

On the beach at Maronti, near the village of Sant'Angelo, the volcanic sand reaches a hundred degrees. The Romans lay in it to cure their joints. The locals still cook in it, fish and potatoes wrapped in foil, buried for an hour. At Sorgeto, on the southern coast, a natural thermal pool sits at the bottom of two hundred stone steps, heated by the volcano, open to everyone, free. People go at midnight and sit in warm water under the stars.

We know this island well. We know which thermal gardens to book and which to skip. We know the restaurant in Sant'Angelo that does not take reservations and does not need to. We know when to send you to Sorgeto so you have the pool almost to yourself.

*Visual imagined with AI, the real Italy is even better

In Italy, the days before Ferragosto have a rhythm that is impossible to explain to anyone who has not lived it. It is a...
14/08/2026

In Italy, the days before Ferragosto have a rhythm that is impossible to explain to anyone who has not lived it. It is a national mood shift. The offices empty. The highways fill. The supermarkets are stripped of watermelons, charcoal, and mozzarella in roughly that order. And every teenager in the country begins preparing the gavettoni, water balloon attacks, with a tactical seriousness that would impress a military strategist.

Nobody knows exactly when the gavettone tradition started. Nobody cares. It is simply what happens in August. They hide behind cars. They ambush from balconies. When the balloons run out, they use buckets. No pedestrian is safe. No tourist is warned.

The gavettoni are only the opening act.

Right now, in gardens across the country, a familiar scene is unfolding. A man, usually a father, usually wearing an apron he found in a drawer, is standing over a charcoal grill, turning sausages that are not yet done while his brother-in-law tells him they are done. This conversation will outlast the sausages. Both men know this. Neither will yield.

On the beaches, the family encampments have reached their full August formation. Four umbrellas pushed together to create a compound. A cooler large enough to feed a platoon. Watermelon being passed hand to hand, juice running down forearms and onto towels that will never fully recover. The grandmother has established a command post in a folding chair and is issuing instructions that everyone hears and no one follows.

In the small towns, the Ferragosto banners are going up across the piazzas. There will be a sagra. There will be a band that plays songs everyone knows. There will be dancing. The porchetta will be excellent. The mayor will say something no one remembers.

This is Italy between August 12 and August 15. The country at its loudest, its most chaotic, its least photogenic and its most completely, unapologetically itself.

It is our favorite version.

*Visual imagined with AI

On August 15, Italy will do what it has done every year for two thousand years. It will stop.Feriae Augusti, the holiday...
12/08/2026

On August 15, Italy will do what it has done every year for two thousand years. It will stop.

Feriae Augusti, the holidays of Augustus. In 18 BC, the emperor declared a period of rest after the harvest. The entire Roman Empire stopped. Slaves were given the day off. Horses were dressed in flowers. Banquets were thrown in the streets. Augustus had invented the concept of the national holiday and the Italians have never let it go.

The Catholic Church later claimed August 15 as the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The sacred and the secular fused, as they always do in Italy, without anyone feeling the need to resolve the contradiction. Ferragosto is both a holy day and the day the entire country goes to the beach. Nobody sees a conflict.

What happens on August 15 in modern Italy is this: everything closes. The bakery, the pharmacy, the mechanic, the newsstand. In Rome, in Milan, in Florence, entire neighborhoods go silent. If you need to buy anything at all, you will learn a new kind of patience.

The Italians are not in the city. They are at the sea, in the mountains, at the family house in the countryside or, most importantly, at the table.

The Ferragosto lunch is, in many families, larger than Christmas. It begins around one. It does not have a scheduled end. The antipasti are a meal in themselves. The pasta is the dish the grandmother makes once a year. The fruit comes out. Then the watermelon. Then the coffee. Then the digestivo. Then the argument about politics that has been building since the secondo.

The children fall asleep in various positions. Someone proposes a swim. Nobody moves. The afternoon becomes the evening without any clear border between them.

Ferragosto is a five-hour lunch with no schedule after it.

If your future Italy includes an August, we will make sure you are at the right table.

Visual imagined with AI

Every Italian can tell you what happens on the night of August 10.The shooting stars come. Le lacrime di San Lorenzo, th...
07/08/2026

Every Italian can tell you what happens on the night of August 10.

The shooting stars come. Le lacrime di San Lorenzo, the tears of Saint Lawrence, the Roman deacon who was roasted alive on a gridiron in the year 258 and who, according to a legend that may or may not be true but that every Italian child has heard, told his executioners to turn him over because one side was done.

The stars are the Perseid meteor shower, cometary debris burning up at sixty kilometers per second. The astronomical peak is around August 12 or 13. The Italian tradition is fixed to the 10th, because San Lorenzo died on the 10th, and in this country the saint's calendar outranks the astronomer's.

On that night, the whole country goes outside.

In the cities, people find the darkest corner they can, the Pincio in Rome, the Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, the Lido in Venice. On the beaches of the south, groups stay past midnight lying on the sand. In the hill towns, someone talks the mayor into killing the street lights for an hour, and the piazza fills with chairs and silence and upturned faces. In the mountains, where there is no light pollution and the sky is so dense with stars it looks solid, the first meteor draws a sound from the crowd that falls somewhere between a gasp and a prayer.

The tradition is to make a wish on each one. The rules: you must see it yourself, you cannot tell anyone what you wished and you must close your eyes. The children never close their eyes. The grandmothers always do.

There is also a poem. Giovanni Pascoli wrote X Agosto in 1897, for his father, who was murdered riding home on a country road on August 10, 1867. In the poem, the falling stars are not wishes. They are tears, the sky weeping over a world that kills good men on their way home. Every Italian reads this poem in school. Most of them think about it, at least briefly, while they look up on the night of the 10th.

This is the Italy that exists between the monuments, the rituals, the poems, the grandmother with her eyes closed in a dark piazza, making a wish she will never tell anyone.

Visual created with AI

Sardinia has two versions of itself and most visitors only see one.The coastal version is the one you know, the Costa Sm...
04/08/2026

Sardinia has two versions of itself and most visitors only see one.

The coastal version is the one you know, the Costa Smeralda, the white sand, the emerald water, the hotels the Aga Khan started building in the 1960s. It is beautiful. It is also about five percent of the island.

The other Sardinia starts forty minutes inland. The road climbs, the signs switch to a language you do not recognize, and the landscape becomes something hard to categorize. Plateaus of grey granite shaped by wind into forms that look deliberate but are not. Cork oak forests where the trunks have been stripped of their bark and stand red and raw like something out of a fever dream. Canyons, the Gorropu gorge is three hundred meters deep and fifteen meters wide at the bottom, and you can hike to the floor of it and stand there in total silence with limestone walls on either side older than anything you have a frame of reference for.

The Supramonte, in the island's interior, is one of the least populated corners of Western Europe. The shepherds who work the mountain pastures still move on foot with their animals. They make cheese in stone shelters. They speak Sardo, not Italian, not a dialect of Italian, but a separate Romance language that linguists consider the closest living descendant of spoken Latin.

Then there are the nuraghi. About seven thousand stone towers scattered across the island, built between roughly 1900 and 730 BC by a people who left no written record of themselves. The biggest, Su Nuraxi in Barumini, is a complex of interlocking towers and curtain walls that predates the Roman Republic by eight centuries. Nobody is entirely sure what they were for. Tombs, temples, fortresses, granaries, the theories shift every decade. The Sardinians themselves tend to answer the question with a shrug and a glass of cannonau.

We design Sardinia for travelers who have seen the coast and suspect the island has more to say. It does. It is two hours from the beach chair and it looks like somewhere else entirely.

Visual created with AI

When people imagine a summer in Italy, they often picture the Amalfi Coast, Tuscany, or the lakes.There is another Italy...
31/07/2026

When people imagine a summer in Italy, they often picture the Amalfi Coast, Tuscany, or the lakes.

There is another Italy that deserves a place on every itinerary.

High in the Dolomites, Val Fiscalina offers a completely different kind of summer. Days begin with crisp mountain air instead of heat. Walking trails wind through alpine meadows, quiet forests, and beneath towering limestone peaks that have earned this landscape UNESCO World Heritage status.

Walk a little. Stop often. Find a mountain hut for lunch. Sit beside an alpine lake. Take in the silence that only the mountains seem able to offer.

For many travelers, these become the days they remember most because they finally had the chance to slow down.

Italy has countless beautiful places.

The Dolomites simply remind you that some of its greatest treasures are found far above sea level.

Ph Credits: Andrea Zanenga | Unsplash

Venice has a rhythm.Arrive just after sunrise, before the cafés fill, before the first crowds gather in St. Mark’s Squar...
28/07/2026

Venice has a rhythm.

Arrive just after sunrise, before the cafés fill, before the first crowds gather in St. Mark’s Square, before the city begins moving at full pace, and Venice feels remarkably different.

The canals are calm. Bridges are almost empty. Shopkeepers are opening their doors, neighbors are greeting each other, and the city is simply living.

It’s the perfect time to wander without a destination. To cross one more bridge just to see what’s on the other side. To stop for an espresso at a neighborhood café. To notice details that disappear later in the day.

Viandando travel is about experiencing an extraordinary place when it is at its most authentic.

For Venice, that moment is early morning.

It’s one of those small details that can completely change the way you remember the city.

Indirizzo

Via Dell'Eremo 3
Bagno A Ripoli
50012

Orario di apertura

Lunedì 09:00 - 17:00
Martedì 09:30 - 17:00
Mercoledì 09:30 - 17:00
Giovedì 09:30 - 17:00
Venerdì 09:30 - 17:00

Telefono

+39055698337

Notifiche

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