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Viandando Luxury Travel, Via dell'Eremo 3, Bagno a Ripoli (2026)

02/06/2026

Today is the second of June.
In Italy, it is the Festa della Repubblica, the Republic Day. It is the most important civic holiday on the Italian calendar and most Americans have never heard of it. So allow us a quiet moment, from Florence, to share what happened on this day.

The year was 1946. The country was asked, by referendum, to choose: keep the king, or become a republic.

The vote was held on the second and third of June. Twelve million seven hundred thousand Italians voted for the republic. Ten million seven hundred thousand voted to keep the monarchy. The margin was decisive but not overwhelming, north of Rome, the republic won handily; in the south, the king kept his support. The Italy that emerged was, from its first day, a country still finding its agreement with itself.
But the more profound fact about that referendum is one that even many Italians forget to mention.

It was the first national vote in the history of Italy in which women cast a ballot.
For a country that had existed as a unified state since 1861, this was, to put it mildly, overdue. But it happened in a single day, on this day, alongside the birth of the republic itself.

Twenty-one women would be elected that summer to the Constituent Assembly, the body charged with drafting the Italian Constitution. They sat alongside 535 men. They argued for paragraphs. They wrote clauses on equality, on family, on dignity, on labor.

The Italy that most travelers experience today, with its women running great vineyards and Michelin restaurants, its nonne who insist that their granddaughters will go to university, its constitution that opens with the words Italy is a democratic republic founded on labor, was drafted, in part, by them.

Umberto II of Savoy, the last king of Italy, had reigned for thirty-four days. He left the country on the 13th of June 1946, took a flight to Lisbon, and never set foot in Italy again, not even in death. He died in Geneva in 1983, having spent thirty-seven years in exile, and was buried in a small abbey in the French Alps. Only in 2017, after a long campaign, were the remains of his wife Queen Marie José finally allowed back into Italy.

A republic, in other words, that was born with a king walking out and women walking in.

Every second of June, the Italian Air Force flies its acrobatic team, the Frecce Tricolori, the tricolor arrows, low over the Altare della Patria in Rome, leaving long trails of green, white, and red smoke across the sky above the Colosseum. The President of the Republic lays a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The military parade descends the Via dei Fori Imperiali. The whole thing lasts perhaps ninety minutes, and the city pauses for it.

It is, we always think, one of the most cinematic civic moments in Europe and one of the least known to travelers.

🇮🇹 Buona Festa della Repubblica.

29/05/2026

There is a letter, written sometime around the year 100 of the common era, that we sometimes quote to travelers who ask us why we love Lake Como.

It was written by Pliny the Younger, a Roman lawyer, magistrate, and prolific correspondent, who happened to have grown up on the lake and never quite stopped going back.

The letter is addressed to his friend Caninius Rufus, who lived nearby, and in it Pliny describes the two villas he owns on the Como shore.

The first, he writes, sits high on a steep slope above the water. He calls it Tragedia, Tragedy, after the tall, elevated boots worn by actors playing tragic roles on the Greek stage. From its terraces, he says, one looks down upon the whole of the lake and the whole of one's ambitions.

The second sits at the water's edge. He calls it Comedia, Comedy, after the low slippers worn by actors in comic plays. From its windows, he writes, one can fish without leaving one's bed.

He moves between them, he explains to his friend, depending on the state of his mind.

Two thousand years before the modern world invented the word wellness, the most cultivated Romans of their generation were already using Lake Como to change internal registers, to step out of one self and into another.

This understanding of what Como is for has, remarkably, persisted across the centuries. The great villas that line the western shore today, Villa d'Este in Cernobbio, Villa Carlotta near Tremezzo, Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio, Villa del Balbianello on its tiny peninsula at Lenno, Villa Pliniana with its private waterfalls at Torno, were not, originally, built to impress.

They were built by the Milanese aristocracy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as retreats for men exhausted by the world: by court politics, by industry, by the increasing noise of a Milan that, even then, was beginning to feel like too much city.

The gardens were designed to slow the pulse. The terraces were oriented to catch the southerly afternoon light. The boats were kept rigged and ready at the small private docks, so that one could be on the water within minutes of deciding one needed to be.

The composers came. Liszt wrote part of his Années de pèlerinage at Villa Melzi. Verdi spent summers nearby. Stendhal called Como the most beautiful place in the world, and he had been to quite a number of places. Later, Henry James, Hemingway, and, more recently, the long parade of Americans who arrive each summer hoping to see a famous neighbor across the water.

The point of Como, however, has never been the famous neighbors. The point of Como is what the place itself does to a person who arrives there exhausted.

This is why we are particular about how we design it. We will not put our travelers on the speedboat tours past the celebrity villas, a brief, frankly disappointing experience that misunderstands the entire spirit of the lake.

We will put you in a small wooden classic launch with a captain who has been on these waters since he was a boy, in the early morning before the wind picks up, with espresso in a thermos and the lake almost entirely to yourselves.

We will arrange a long private lunch on the terrace of one of the historic villas, the kind of lunch where the wine arrives without being ordered, and where the afternoon, when it comes, is not scheduled to be anywhere in particular.

We will leave the rest of the day deliberately empty.

This, in our experience, is when Como begins to do its actual work.

If your 2026 includes a stretch of slowing down, for an anniversary, a milestone, a return after many years, or simply because you have earned the right to a long quiet afternoon on a terrace, we would be honored to design it.

Ph Credits: Rick Govic | Unsplash

https://viandandoluxurytravel.com/plan-your-trip/

26/05/2026

There is a paragraph in an essay John Steinbeck wrote in 1953 that we think about often.

He had spent six weeks in Positano the previous summer, paying, by his own account, about two dollars a night for his room and Harper's Bazaar had asked him to write something about it.

The piece is short, two pages long, and the opening line has been quoted so many times it has nearly lost its meaning. "Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn't quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone."

What is less often quoted is the rest of the essay, which is mostly about how desperately Steinbeck hoped the place would not be ruined.

He need not have worried, exactly, though not for the reasons he imagined.

Positano did become famous, Jackie Kennedy swam off the Spiaggia di Fornillo with photographers half a mile out at sea, Mick Jagger wrote part of an album in the hills above the village, Franco Zeffirelli kept a house here, Diane von Furstenberg still does but it did not stop being itself. It simply added layers.

Every generation of sophisticated travelers, from Steinbeck's onward, has arrived convinced they were the first to discover Positano and every generation has been a little bit right.

The Positano of the cruise ship day-trippers, the one most visitors now encounter, and which is, frankly, what most of our first-time travelers fear they will find, exists for about ten hours a day, between roughly eleven in the morning and nine at night.

It is loud, beautiful, crowded, and Instagrammed beyond reason.

The Positano of John Steinbeck is the one that begins after the last ferry has pulled away.

Around half past eight, the cruise ships and day boats blow their horns in the harbor below and turn back toward Sorrento or Capri. By nine, the streets that were impassable at noon have gone quiet. The lights of the houses begin to come on, one by one, climbing the cliff. The shopkeepers close their shutters. The waiters change shifts. And the village, for a few hours, every single night, exactly as it has for seventy years, becomes the village again.

This is the Positano we book for our travelers.

We have, by now, returned dozens of travelers to Positano who had visited it once before, in their thirties or forties, on a cruise stop or a day trip from Rome, and left thinking they had seen it. They had not.

If 2026 is the year you give yourself the right version of this place, not the one in the brochures, but the one Steinbeck wrote about, let's talk.

https://viandandoluxurytravel.com/

Ph Credits: Tom Robak | Unsplash

22/05/2026

People often write to ask us, very gently, how it actually works.
Here is the answer.

You write to us. A sentence is enough. "I have been thinking about Italy for ten years and don't know where to begin." Or "It's our 30th anniversary and we'd like to do it properly this time." Or, sometimes, simply: "I want to see the real Italy."

All three of these are perfect first messages. None of them require you to have a plan.

Within a day, you'll hear back from our team. We'll ask you three questions. Three, no more. They are the questions that, after years of doing this work, we have learned matter most. You'll be able to answer them in about ten minutes, from your kitchen, with a cup of coffee.

Then we go to work.

One week later, sometimes a little less, you'll receive a proposed itinerary. An actual journey, built specifically for you, with a reason behind every decision: why this hotel and not the one next door, why this private guide in Florence rather than the larger company, why we have put a quiet day in the middle of the second week rather than at the end.

Most of our travelers tell us, upon reading it for the first time, that it reads like a letter and that the version of Italy described in it is the one they had been quietly hoping for, without quite being able to name it.

From there, we refine. You tell us what to keep, what to change, what to push further. We adjust as many times as you'd like. When you're ready, we book everything: the hotels, the drivers, the private experiences, the table reservations at the restaurants that don't take online reservations, the boats, the after-hours museum access, the small things you didn't know to ask for.

We handle the calls. The reservations. The logistics. The language. The unexpected. The Italian holiday calendar. The strike that may happen on the third Tuesday. The driver who needs to be re-routed because of a parade in Lucca that wasn't announced until forty-eight hours before. All of it.

You handle the packing.

That, honestly, is the whole thing.

If Italy has been a quiet thought in the back of your mind for a while, the message that starts it can be as short as you like.

We read every one of them personally.
https://viandandoluxurytravel.com/plan-your-trip/

19/05/2026

There is a dish on the Italian coast with a quiet, almost surprising history.

It is called spaghetti allo scoglio, "spaghetti of the rock", and seventy years ago, nobody had ever heard of it. It did not exist on a single menu in Italy.

It was invented by fishermen.

In the years after the war, along the Campanian and Ligurian coasts, the men who fished these waters would sell their catch at dawn, the spigole, the orate, the large fish that fetched a real price at the market.

What they kept for themselves was what the Italians, with their wonderful gift for naming things, called lo scoglio, the rock. It meant everything that had clung to the rocks or come up tangled in the nets with no commercial value: a handful of mussels, a few clams, a small octopus, a single scampo, perhaps a crab if the morning had been generous.

They threw it all into a pan with olive oil and a clove of garlic, a splash of dry white wine, the smallest possible amount of tomato, sometimes none at all, and a handful of spaghetti cooked just on the firm side of al dente. They ate it standing in the harbor in the late morning, or carried it home to a kitchen table where their wives were waiting.

It was, in the most literal sense, a dish made from what could not be sold.

Today it is one of the most coveted plates on the Italian coast, served in the seaside trattorie, in the harborside restaurants.

This is the Italy we cook for our travelers, quietly, the right way, in the right places, with the families who have been doing it since their grandparents' generation.

15/05/2026

Michelangelo did not want to paint the Sistine Chapel.

He told Pope Julius II, repeatedly and in writing, that he was a sculptor, that painting was beneath him, and frescoing a ceiling especially so. The Pope insisted. Michelangelo, who had refused many things in his life but could not refuse a Pope, climbed the scaffolding in May of 1508.

He came down four years later.

He had painted, alone for most of those years, three hundred figures across five hundred square meters of ceiling, standing on his feet the entire time, head tilted back, paint dripping into his eyes and beard.

The legend that he painted lying on his back is a romantic invention. He wrote letters to his father describing how his eyesight had deteriorated, how he could no longer read a letter held normally in front of him without raising it above his head.

He was thirty-seven when he started. He was nearly old when he came down.

The thing we love most about bringing our travelers here is the silence. Before-hours access, fifteen people in the entire chapel, an art historian who has spent twenty years inside this room. Just the ceiling, the way it was meant to be seen.

If Rome belongs in your 2026, we would be honored to design it properly.

Ph Credits: Ágatha Depiné | Unsplash

12/05/2026

There is a particular stretch of water, just off the southeastern coast of a small island in the Bay of Naples, where three pinnacles of limestone rise from the sea.

They are called the Faraglioni.

They are, to most travelers, simply beautiful, three pale, sun-warmed rocks against an impossibly blue sea, photographed perhaps more often than any other geological feature in the Mediterranean. But to those who slow down long enough to look properly, they are something rather more extraordinary.

Begin with the rock itself. It is dolomitic limestone, laid down at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea during the late Triassic period, roughly two hundred million years ago. The continents had not yet taken their current shapes. The Atlantic Ocean did not exist. The animal you would have most likely encountered, had you been standing here, was a small reptile that had not yet decided whether to become a dinosaur.

Over the slow centuries that followed, the seabed lifted. The water receded. The wind, the salt, and the rain began their patient work, and continued it without interruption through the rise and fall of every civilization the Mediterranean would ever know.

The shapes you see today, the three distinct spires, each one taller than a fifteen-story building, the natural sea arch through the middle one, are the result of approximately one hundred thousand years of weathering. They will, of course, continue to change. But not on any timescale you will ever witness.

Each of the three has a name.

The first, still attached to the island by a narrow ridge, is Stella, the star. The second, separated by a slim channel of deep cobalt water and pierced by a natural archway through which a small wooden boat can pass when the sea is calm, is Faraglione di Mezzo, the middle one. It is the only natural arch in Europe, geologists will tell you, that traverses a free-standing offshore stack.
The third and furthest, Scopolo, is home to one of the most curious vertebrates in the Mediterranean: a sub-species of wall lizard whose skin, after several thousand years of isolation on a single rock, has evolved into a soft, almost otherworldly powder blue.

They exist nowhere else on Earth.

The Roman emperor Tiberius, who spent the last decade of his life on this island, would have known these rocks intimately. So would the Greek sailors who, a thousand years before him, gave them the name from which our word faraglione descends, pharos, the Greek for lighthouse. In an age before instruments, before charts, the three spires guided ships home.

It is, in our long experience of designing extraordinary Italian moments, one of the most quietly affecting ten minutes any traveler will spend in this country. We never tire of arranging it.

If 2026 is your year for Capri and the Amalfi coast, the most exceptional accommodations and private boats book out eight to ten months in advance. The conversation is best started now.

Ph credits: Will Truettner | Unsplash

08/05/2026

In the summer of 1822, Lord Byron used to swim from a sea cave on the Ligurian coast across an open stretch of the Mediterranean, five and a half kilometers, in waves and sun, to meet Percy Bysshe Shelley on the other side of the bay.

He did it more than once. The cave is still there. It bears his name now.

The village above the cave is called Portovenere, Port of Venus, and it is, in our considered opinion, one of the most quietly extraordinary places in all of Italy.

Here is what you need to know.
When most travelers come to this stretch of the Italian Riviera, they go to the Cinque Terre. They take the regional train, they walk through the five villages in a single afternoon, they photograph Vernazza from above, and they leave.

It is, there is no other way to put it, a beautiful experience that is, increasingly, a crowded one.

Ten kilometers to the south of all of that, on a slim peninsula reaching out into the Gulf of Poets, sits Portovenere. The Romans named it after Venus. The Republic of Genoa fortified it in the 12th century. Byron, Shelley, and later D.H. Lawrence chose it over every other Italian coast they knew.

And somehow, despite all of that, it has remained, a small, perfectly preserved fishing village of tall pastel houses leaning along a single curving harbor, with a 12th-century black-and-white marble church standing alone on a fingertip of rock above the open sea.

Above the church: a Genoese castle.
Just offshore: the islands of Palmaria, Tino, and Tinetto, wild, almost entirely uninhabited, reachable only by private boat, with sea caves and coves and water of a color that does not seem possible until you are in it.

Here is how we design Portovenere for our travelers.
We place you in one of the very small number of restored historic residences in the village, most have only a handful of suites, a private dock, terraces over the water, and the kind of staff who remember your espresso preference by the second morning.

We arrange a private boat for the day, with a captain who knows the islands the way most people know their own neighborhood; you swim from coves no day-tripper will ever find, lunch on board, return at golden hour. We book a long, slow dinner on a terrace overlooking the church of San Pietro at sunset, when the marble glows pink and the sea turns the color of dark wine.

And we leave room, always, for the unscheduled hour. The mid-afternoon walk along the harbor. The aperitivo at a tiny bar where the owner pours something he thinks you should try. The morning when nothing is planned, and you do not want anything to be planned, because the village is enough.

This is what we mean when we talk about the Italy beyond the postcards. It is not hidden. It is just chosen.

If 2026 is your year for the Italian Riviera, we would be honored to design it.

Visit the link to begin -> https://viandandoluxurytravel.com/plan-your-trip/

Ph Credits: Ryan Klaus | Unsplash

05/05/2026

There is a particular kind of trip we love to design more than any other.
The trip with three generations.

Last spring, a family of seven came to us. The grandmother was eighty-one. The granddaughter was eleven. Three other adults, a daughter, a son-in-law, an uncle, somewhere in the middle, keeping the wheels turning, as the middle generation always does.

On our first call, the daughter told us two things, almost in passing.
The first: that her mother had been carrying Rome in her head for sixty years. That when she was a girl, in a small kitchen in Boston in 1964, her own mother had shown her a magazine photograph of the Pantheon, and she had quietly carried that image with her ever since, through a working life, three children, the loss of a husband, a quieter decade after, without ever quite believing she would see it for herself.

The second: that the eleven-year-old granddaughter, the youngest of the family, had only ever eaten pasta from a box.

Two sentences in a phone call. Two sentences that, for us, were the whole trip.
We built every one of the seven days around those two moments.

For the grandmother, we arranged a private, before-hours entry to Saint Peter's Basilica, just the family, an English-speaking art historian, and the silence of an empty cathedral. The grandmother stopped at the threshold and didn't move for almost a full minute. Her daughter, who had been her caregiver for years, very quietly reached for her hand. We were told later that no one in the family spoke for the rest of the visit.

For the granddaughter, we drove the family three days later into the hills of Emilia-Romagna, to a small family farmhouse where an eighty-three-year-old nonna, Maria, who had been making pasta on the same wooden board since she was nine, was waiting for her. Maria spoke no English. The girl spoke no Italian. It did not matter. By the end of the morning, the eleven-year-old had rolled, cut, and cooked her own tagliatelle, eaten three plates of it, and announced, with the unshakable conviction of an eleven-year-old, that she would never again eat pasta from a box.

The hotels, the drivers, the timing of every transfer, the meals, the rest days, the small bottle of cold water always waiting for the grandmother in the car, the early Vatican access, the slow Bolognese morning with Maria, all of it, every detail, engineered around two sentences from a phone call.

That is what we do. That is the entire reason we exist.

We design fully tailor-made Italian journeys for American families and discerning travelers, for milestone trips, for legacy trips, for the trip the grandmother has been carrying in her head for sixty years.

If 2026 is your family's year, we would be honored to design it.
https://viandandoluxurytravel.com/plan-your-trip/

01/05/2026

May in Italy doesn't announce itself.
It arrives slowly, the way the best things do. The wisteria opens first, those impossible cascades of pale violet that drape over stone walls in Florence, in Asolo, in a thousand smaller villages no one has heard of, turning every other doorway into something out of a Merchant Ivory film.

Then comes the bread. May is when the air in the bakeries changes, the windows steam at six in the morning, and you can smell the pane toscano cooling on long wooden boards from half a block away. It is, we have decided, the most generous smell in the world.

May in Italy smells like wisteria and bread and espresso cooling on a windowsill.
It also sounds like church bells you didn't know were coming. It feels like the warmth of an old stone bench at four in the afternoon.

It looks like olive trees in their first silver-green flush, and lemon trees heavy in Amalfi, and a single sailboat far out on a bay in Sicily where you happen to be the only foreign guests on a private terrace at lunch.

You cannot search for any of this.
You cannot rate it, save it to a list, or filter for it.
There is no app for that.
There is us.

This is what we have built our craft around, for years, only for travelers who care about exactly this kind of thing. We design private, tailor-made Italian journeys for discerning travelers from the United States, from the first conversation to the last sunset. Every detail considered. Every door opened in advance. Every quiet, unrepeatable moment made possible.

If 2026 is the year you give yourself the May or June or September you've been imagining, let's begin the conversation now. The most exceptional accommodations and experiences are already booking out for next spring.

https://viandandoluxurytravel.com/plan-your-trip/

Viandando Luxury Travel

02/06/2026

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26/05/2026

22/05/2026

19/05/2026

15/05/2026

12/05/2026

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