Meet Your Hosts

Two small mountain towns, one farmhouse on the Tuscan coast.

I grew up in a big, loud, loving Italian family. Arnaud grew up in Chamonix, in the French Alps, where the mountains taught him early that the best things happen off the marked routes.

Twenty years ago I bought a crumbling 18th-century farmhouse on the Bolgheri Wine Road. Twelve years ago, Arnaud came down from the mountains as a cycling guide, met me here, and never left. This is the household we have built together. For five days, every spring and autumn, we open it to eight people at a time.

Why the people are the tour

A place is only as deep as the people who let you into it.

There are many ways to see Tuscany. Most of them are competent. A bus, a guide, a checklist of villages and tasting rooms — you will see things, you will photograph them, you will go home. Nothing wrong with that.

What we offer is something different, and it requires being honest about why. You can stand on the same cobblestones as a local and not see what they see. You can drink the same wine and not taste what they taste. The difference is not the cobblestones or the wine. The difference is who you came with.

So the most useful thing I can tell you, before you read another word about the tour, is who Arnaud and I actually are.

Chicca

I am Tuscan-Neapolitan, an architect by training, a cook by inheritance.

For fifteen years before I settled here, I was a long-distance cyclist. I crossed Alaska, Australia, Ecuador, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, and most of Europe on a bicycle. I pressed flowers from each country and made small artworks from them. I learned that strangers feed you almost everywhere if you arrive without a plan.

The cooking I learned earlier, and from one person. For fifty-four years, our family had a Nanny named Lina. She cooked for us my entire childhood. She never measured anything. She tasted constantly. She knew when pasta dough was ready by pressing it with the back of her hand. I followed her around the kitchen with a Hello Kitty notebook, writing down recipes she had never written down herself. The recipes in it are mostly wrong, because what she actually taught me was something a notebook cannot hold: that cooking is intuition, season, generosity, and the love you have for the people you are cooking for. Made edible.

When my daughter Elsa was born, I stopped wandering and started looking for a place to put down roots. I found this farmhouse in Castagneto Carducci — eighteenth century, half-collapsed, ringed by fifty olive trees and nine thousand square meters of land. I restored it myself. I designed the kitchen around the way I actually cook: Carrara marble countertops because they stay cool when you are working pasta in August, windows over the olive grove, the herb garden three steps from the door.

This is where Arnaud and I live. Where I cook for my family every day. Where flour permanently dusts the corners. Where the wooden spoons are worn smooth.

Arnaud

I am the French half of this household.

Igrew up in Chamonix and spent my twenties working in one of its legendary cafés as a DJ, then in restaurants and bars across France and beyond. I developed a possibly unhealthy obsession with finding the perfect espresso, the ideal pizza crust, and the gelato worth crossing town for. (These obsessions persist. Chicca will tell you about my morning coffee rituals if you give her the opening.)

Eventually, words pulled me toward copywriting, and a camera pulled me toward photography. I came to Castagneto twelve years ago to work as a cycling guide for Andy Hampsten — the only American to have ever won the Giro d’Italia. I led groups along the Bolgheri Wine Road, the cypress avenue, the inland hills toward Volterra. I was supposed to leave at the end of the season. Then I met Chicca. I never went back to the mountains.

Every photograph and every video on this website is mine. Not from a hired professional. Not from a stock library. From the man who actually lives in this house, walks these roads, and has been there at the door, with the camera, on the morning every guest leaves. If the images on this site move you, it is because they were not made to sell you anything.

I am not a wine expert. I want to say that clearly. The wine authority on this tour belongs to Marina, the architect-winemaker who built the only certified biodynamic estate in Bolgheri from scratch, and to the winemakers we have known for years who pour their bottles at our table. My role is the eye, the words, and the small things — the cappuccino spot on Day 3, the gelato in Bolgheri at six in the evening, the timing that makes a day feel effortless.

The household

Two cultures, one kitchen.

We are a Franco-Italian household with an English accent layered over both. The kitchen runs in two languages. The dog has, we believe, learned both. We argue, in the affectionate way of long couples, about whether the espresso machine is set correctly and about who put the rosemary back in the wrong place. Our daughter Elsa moves between the two cultures the way someone bilingual moves between two rooms.

There is a pétanque court in the garden because Arnaud insisted. There is a vegetable and herb garden because I insisted. We use both, often at the same time, often with guests.

Twice a week during tour season, eight strangers walk through our gate. By Wednesday, they know our names and our dog’s name. By Friday, we are exchanging email addresses. We have welcomed travelers from forty-three countries across six continents over twenty years. Some come back three times. Some come back five.

Testimonials

Watch what actually happens.

Arnaud filmed the tour, year after year. The arrivals, the cooking, the wine, the goodbyes.

What we actually offer

Five days. Eight chairs. Twice a year.

Five days at our farmhouse and in the village we live in. Eight people at a time. The wine of Bolgheri, poured by the people who make it. The food of this house, cooked at the table where we eat it. The villages we know by heart. A network of friends — Luca at the hotel, Marina at the cellar, Rita at the spice farm, the cheese family whose children we have watched grow up — temporarily extended to you.

We will pick you up from the train. We will drop you off five days later. In between, you will not need your wallet for anything you have not chosen yourself.

That is the whole offer. There is no upgrade tier. There is no luxury package. There are eight chairs at the table, every spring and every autumn, and we hold them for the people who find their way to us.

Before you book

Let’s meet.

The next step is a conversation, not a booking form. I answer my own emails. The phone number on this site is mine. If something on this page made you feel that you might want to spend a week with us — write.

Write to Chicca — let’s set up a call

See the five days

A presto, Chicca

chicca@cookingintuscany.cc · +39 333 4234 217