Luxury Italy travel: Puglia, Sicily, the Amalfi Coast, the lakes, & beyond

Italy is the country I know best and the one I am asked about most. I have been building trips here since I started this business, and the thing that makes an Italian trip work is almost never in a guidebook.

The Italy people picture is the Italy of the north. Florence, Venice, Tuscany, the lakes. All of it deserves the reputation. But the trips my clients still talk about years later tend to be further south. Puglia, where the food is the best argument in the country and the crowds have not arrived. Sicily, which is less an Italian region than a civilization of its own. The Amalfi Coast taken slowly and from the water rather than the main road.

Plan it for me!

Italy rewards travelers who arrive with someone who already knows the answers. Which agriturismo is genuinely lovely and which is a farmhouse charging a resort rate. Which cooking class is a nonna in her own kitchen and which is forty people in a hotel function room. Which museums need booking months ahead and which you can simply walk into at opening. Which towns empty out at the end of the season and which stay alive. And the drivers, because in Italy the right driver is worth more to your week than an upgraded room.

Below are the Italy trips I build most often, from a week in Puglia to a slow pass through the northern lakes. They are starting points, not scripts, and every one gets rebuilt around the people traveling. If what you want is not here, truffle season in Piedmont, a Rome and Naples pairing, a villa for an extended family, a honeymoon, or a women's small group departure, tell me on our call and I will design it from scratch.