Individual Tours: Cooking Lessons in Lucca

Posted on December 13, 2018 by admin

You’re never alone in the kitchen especially when taking our individual cooking tours. Inside the walls of Lucca, there are many excellent restaurants that serve, depending on the time of year, piatto forte, buccellato, garmugia, rapini, gobbi, rovelline, trippa, verdure al tegame… Fantastic, but what are they exactly? And how can you boast to friends, once you return home, about the beauty of the hills of Lucca dotted with 17th/18th-century monumental villas, and the wonderful cuisine that stimulated you to take cooking lessons in order to learn how to make the dishes perfectly? No problem, it’s easy. Just call us! We can organize a guided tour that takes you through the spectacular hills of olive groves and vineyards and through the villas with their parks and gardens, which, depending on the season, are blooming with camellias, azaleas, wisteria, and...

The Italian TV show “Cake Star” arrives in Lucca with Damiano Carrara

Posted on February 8, 2018 by admin

There are many Lucchesi throughout the world that have worked as actors, singers, writers, bankers, figurine makers. Then there is Damiano Carrara, a young and handsome pastry chef. Damiano was born in Lucca in 1985 and began working as a bartender. He migrated to Ireland and then to California, where, in a blink of an eye, he opened up “Carrara Pastries” with his brother, Massimiliano. A success. Perhaps it’s in part because he’s quite good-looking, with a luminous smile and sunny disposition, that the Food Network called him to compete in the Spring Baking Championship, but, more likely, it was a network screen test. The following year, in fact, he became a judge of the Halloween Baking Championship, Spring Baking Championship, and, in 2017, of Bake Off Italia. He also wrote a couple of cookbooks with his brother: Dolce...

Mei’s Sweet Pastry Tarts. “Experiential” Tourism 2017

Posted on March 27, 2017 by admin

Tuscany, Lucca, March, the sun, and the desire for spring. Another new season begins. And here I am, in the streets of my “old” city. Lucca is older than me, and yet, it is as if it were 54 years old like me. I feel that it is part of my being, having walked and explored every single inch of it. You could say that when a new tourist-guiding season rolls round, I feel as if I were a 54-year-old tree that discovers its new leaves, leaves that look the same but are not the same of years past. If the old trees planted on the ramparts of the walls around the city could speak, they might say I was right. New stimulation and knowledge to impart to my new friends visiting Lucca. And this actually happens to almost...

The Art of Taste and Taste in Art – Part 4

Posted on March 20, 2017 by admin

Now let us talk about a place where sophisticated food and delicacies would be prepared and served to a select minority: the palazzos of the wealthy. There are two aspects to Palazzo Mansi. It is an emblematic example of the many patrician residences in Lucca and also a national museum that houses numerous paintings, an art gallery. Many of the paintings portray products that were cultivated in the territory in the past (and are still cultivated today) and the commercial activities and customs that went hand-in-hand with the products. The palazzo is located at Via Galli Tassi, 43. The exterior of the building with its light-coloured plaster walls and rather insignificant shuttered windows does not, in any way, exhibit the Baroque magnificence of the interior nor the precious handmade articles also found within. This is typical of the reserved...

The Art of Taste and Taste in Art – Part 3

Posted on March 8, 2017 by admin

Another interesting aspect, from a historical point of view, is to find the places in town where commercial activity in regard to food and foodstuffs took place over the centuries beginning in medieval times through to the 19th century and compare it to today. Starting off at the Cathedral, we can stroll along the network of narrow streets that connected to the main axes of the city road system dating back to Roman times, the Cardo, that ran north – south, and the Decumanus, that ran east – west. Beyond Piazza Antelminelli, we enter Via San Donnino and then turn onto the charming Via del Battistero. Today, Via del Battistero is a succession of antique shops where an astute collector can find pieces of undisputed quality from any time period, be it furniture or figurative art, historically tied to...

The Art of Taste and Taste in Art: Lucca and its Food, History, Art – Part Two

Posted on January 24, 2017 by admin

We turn another page as we enter the cathedral. The church and its furnishings are the outcome of almost five hundred years of expansions, modifications, and restorations. Altars, sculptures, paintings, intarsia, frescoes, furnishings, and organs have been added, removed, modified or stratified in the course of the centuries that have marked the history of the building and its relationship to events in the history of Lucca. Nonetheless, the emergence of figurative art among all the modifications is substantial and was carried out between the 15th and 16th centuries. In the right transept, there is the monumental altar containing the relics of Saint Regulus and also dedicated to Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian. This work is by the Renaissance artist Matteo Civitali of Lucca, who produced the majority of the sculptures and reliefs found within the cathedral in the...

The Art of Taste and Taste in Art: Lucca and its Food, History, Art – Part One

Posted on January 17, 2017 by admin

According to a recent survey, as reported by the Italian news agency ANSA, one out of every three people like to immortalize what they are about to eat with a photo, shifting from a sensation of sight to a more intimate and personal sensation of taste. In essence, that is why I believe this itinerary is still perfectly in sync with today: a one hundred percent Lucca itinerary melded in the cultural and culinary microcosm of the many Italian cities that constitute the multi-flavoured and multi-coloured palette of multifaceted Italy. We can therefore compare iconographic elements linked to food that, wisely elaborated through time, have served as instruments to both educate the masses and entertain the wealthy of Lucca. The city has always been a commercial centre, often extremely sacred and pious, yet even very profane and at times,...