Eighteen years ago, Paola and I drove down a dirt road in the hills above Montalcino because someone at a gas station told us we should. We were looking for lunch. What we found changed the entire shape of what CDV would become.
It was 2007, our first year running tours. Paola and I had spent the previous six months building relationships in Tuscany — restaurants, wine producers, a few cooking schools — and we thought we had it figured out. Then we got lost on the way back from a vineyard visit and ended up on a road that wasn't on any map we had.
The farmhouse appeared around a bend: stone, maybe four hundred years old, with a vegetable garden that ran the full length of one wall and a smell coming from the kitchen window that stopped us both. We knocked. Maria answered. She was seventy-two years old, had never heard of CDV, and was about to eat lunch alone. She invited us to stay. We stayed for four hours.
She wasn't a cooking instructor. She wasn't a restaurateur. She was a woman who had cooked the same recipes her grandmother taught her, in the same kitchen, for most of her life. The pasta was hand-rolled — pici, thick and rough, which is how it's supposed to be — and the ragù had been going since morning. She explained things not as technique but as story: this is how my grandmother did it, this is why the wine goes in at this moment, this is what my mother always said about the tomatoes.
Tuscany & Amalfi Coast
10 Days · Up to 12 guests · From $5,495 per person
Maria will teach you her grandmother's pasta. Marco will pour wine from vines his family has tended for four generations. By day three, they'll greet you by name.
We drove back to Florence that evening and talked about it for hours. We'd been building a tour around places. What Maria had shown us was that the tour should be built around people — the places would follow. We called her the next week. It took about a year of conversations before she agreed to host a small group in her kitchen. That first session, with six guests who barely spoke Italian, ended with everyone at her table eating together and Maria announcing, in no uncertain terms, that they were all terrible at rolling pasta but she would forgive them. The guests loved her completely. She's been part of every Tuscany itinerary we've built since.
Co-Founder
Michael co-founded Culture Discovery Vacations in 2006 with his wife Paola after years of living and working in Italy. He has led over 200 tours across six countries and still finds himself surprised by what happens when people eat together.