Most package tours of Tuscany operate on the same model: cover the maximum number of notable places in the minimum amount of time, deliver the highlights efficiently, return the client to their departure point having seen everything on the list. This model is not wrong. It is optimized for breadth. If the goal is to…
Florence is not the problem. Florence is extraordinary — one of the densest concentrations of human artistic achievement in the world, a city that justifies every superlative applied to it and earns every visit it receives. The problem is what Florence does to a Tuscany trip when it becomes the entire Tuscany trip. Most visitors…
There are roads in Tuscany that exist in travel photography and roads that exist in real life. Most of the famous ones — the cypress-lined avenue at San Quirico d’Orcia, the Gladiator road in Val d’Orcia — are both. They are genuinely beautiful and they are genuinely crowded, particularly in the hours when the light…