Experiences
Food tours, cooking classes and truffle hunts
Honest write-ups of what actually happens, what you pay, and whether it is worth the morning.
Food tourRome Food TourA Rome food tour is three to four hours on foot, six to eight tastings, almost always inside one neighbou…Food tourBologna Food TourBologna is the one Italian city where a food tour is arguably better than eating alone, because the regio…Food tourFlorence Food TourFlorence has fewer people searching for food tours than Rome or Bologna and more restaurants built for to…Cooking classRome Cooking ClassA Rome cooking class is three to four hours of making fresh pasta with your hands and then eating it with…Cooking classTuscany Cooking ClassA Tuscany cooking class means a farmhouse or villa half an hour outside Florence, hand-rolled pici, and l…Wine tourTuscany Wine TourThe $90 full-day wine tour from Florence spends four hours on a bus and visits two estates that are set u…Truffle huntingTuscany Truffle HuntingTruffle hunting in Tuscany is an hour in the woods with a hunter and a dog, then a truffle lunch. What ma…Truffle huntingPiedmont Truffle HuntingAlba is where the world's most expensive truffle is sold, and the hunt you can book is a daytime demonstr…Food tourVenice Food TourA Venice food tour is a bacaro crawl: two to three hours, five or six wine bars, cicchetti eaten standing…Food tourNaples Food TourNaples is the cheapest food city in Italy and the most chaotic to eat in. A tour buys you the order of op…Food tourPalermo Street Food TourPalermo's street food is Arab, Norman and Spanish layered over each other and sold from carts. A tour is …Food tourParma Ham and Parmesan TourThe Parma tour is a dairy at dawn, a ham cellar in the hills and, if the itinerary is honest, a culatello…Food tourModena Balsamic Vinegar TourA balsamic tour in Modena is forty-five minutes in an attic full of small barrels and it ends, essentiall…Cooking classBologna Pasta Cooking ClassA Bologna pasta class is a wooden board, a metre-long rolling pin, and an hour of learning that your fore…Cooking classFlorence Cooking ClassFlorence has more cooking classes per square kilometre than anywhere in Italy, and most teach the same pa…Wine tourChianti Wine TourChianti is forty minutes from Florence and a very well-organised industry: some cellars pay to receive co…Wine tourBarolo Wine TourBarolo is eleven communes of Nebbiolo on hills where the soil changes every few hundred metres, and the c…Food tourTurin Chocolate TourTurin invented hazelnut chocolate because Napoleon cut off the cocoa, and it invented drinking chocolate …Wine tourVerona and Valpolicella Wine TourValpolicella starts 15 kilometres north-west of Verona and makes four wines from the same grapes by dryin…Truffle huntingAlba Truffle HuntingThe Alba white truffle season runs from late September to the end of January, and everything sold outside…Cooking classNaples Pizza Making ClassNeapolitan pizza dough needs 8 to 24 hours to mature, which means no class can honestly take you from flo…Cooking classRome Pasta Making ClassA serious Rome pasta class runs three hours, gives every person their own board and rolling pin, and teac…Food tourSicily Street Food TourSicily is 25,000 square kilometres and its street food changes completely between Palermo and Catania, th…Food tourAmalfi Coast Lemon Grove TourThe lemon terraces above the Amalfi Coast are reached by stone staircases, not by road, and a typical vis…Food tourPuglia Olive Oil TourPuglia presses its olives between late October and December, and a mill visited in July is a clean, silen…Food tourMilan Food TourMilan is the Italian city food tours skip, on the grounds that it has no cuisine of its own. It has one o…Cooking classSicily Cooking ClassA Sicilian class is two lessons in one: the market, argued over in a dialect that is not Italian, and the…Food tourVenice Cicchetti Tour (Bacaro Crawl)A bacaro crawl is the only way to eat well in Venice for thirty-five euro, and it runs on Venetian hours:…