I showed up to my first CDV trip with two suitcases, a portable clothing steamer, and exactly zero good walking shoes. I've been on five trips since and have learned a lot. Here's what actually matters — and what you can leave at home.
The most important thing in your bag is shoes. Not elegant shoes — walking shoes. You will cover ground: market cobblestones, farmhouse courtyards, hillside vineyards, the stairs of an apartment building where someone's family has made cheese for generations. If your feet hurt, everything else suffers. Bring one pair of good walking shoes that you've already broken in. This is not negotiable.
The second thing: clothes you don't mind cooking in. Our days include hands-on time in real kitchens, which means olive oil, flour, and the occasional splash of red wine. Bring comfortable layers you actually feel good in, because you'll be in photos — the ones you send to people back home to make them jealous — and you want to look like yourself. Dark colors hide evidence of a successful pasta lesson.
Leave room in your bag for coming home. Not a little room — real room. You will accumulate things: a bottle of olive oil wrapped in a shirt, a tin of saffron, that jar of fig preserves someone pressed on you at the farmhouse. Plan for this from the beginning. The guests who pack light going out are the ones who board the return flight without the stress of overweight bags and with everything they fell in love with safely stowed.
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.
A few other things worth bringing: a small notebook (you'll want to write things down and phones feel wrong in certain moments), a good scarf (markets and churches are cooler than you expect, and a scarf is the fastest way to look like you know what you're doing), and an appetite for unexpected schedule changes. Weather moves differently in October in Tuscany. A vineyard tour might extend two hours because the owner has more to show you. The cooking lesson that was supposed to end at noon is still going at 2 PM because no one wants it to end. Leave the rigid itinerary in the planning phase. Bring flexibility instead.
Culture Discovery Vacations
The CDV team is based in the United States, Italy, and Portugal. Between us we have decades of experience leading small groups through the food, people, and places that make these destinations worth returning to.