The week, day by day

I. The Threshold

You arrive in Castagneto Carducci by train, or we collect you from the airport if that is what you have arranged with us. The first face you see in this village is mine.

We bring you to Luca’s hotel — seven rooms on the hillside, ten minutes from our gate, with a view of the olive groves running down toward the Mediterranean. You unpack. You shower off the journey. You take ten minutes on the breakfast terrace and you watch the late afternoon happen.

Then we gather. Luca brings out a bottle of his own wine, the welcome glass, and the eight of you meet for the first time. By the second glass, the strangers are no longer strangers.

We walk to La Casa Toscana for the first dinner. The 18th-century farmhouse on the Bolgheri Wine Road, the Carrara marble kitchen, the herb garden three steps from the door. The dog will probably investigate your bags. We cook the first meal together — something simple, the kind of dish I make for my own family — and we eat at the long table. Eight people. One bottle, then a second. Stories. Where you come from. Why you are here. By the end of the night, the threshold has been crossed.

II. The Coast

We start with breakfast on the terrace, then drive to the coast. Populonia is a fortified hilltop town where the Etruscans mined iron three thousand years ago. We climb the castle tower for the 360-degree view — on a clear day, you can see Corsica and Elba.

Lunch is at our favorite seafood restaurant, the one set right on the beach. This is the meal where Arnaud and I quietly pay our own bill, because we want to be there with you, but we are not on duty — we are at our favorite table with friends.

In the afternoon, the first winery. Often it is Marina — an architect, like me, who fell in love with a small wooded valley and built the only certified biodynamic estate in Bolgheri from scratch. She walks us through her vineyards. She explains, in her own words, what biodynamic actually means and why she chose the harder path.

Then we drive to Bolgheri village — the medieval hamlet at the end of the cypress avenue. We walk it in the soft hour before dinner. Stone houses. Brick archways. Shopkeepers closing for the evening. Dinner is at the wine shop in Bolgheri where the locals eat. By the end of the night, you have tasted the coast and the hills in the same day.

III. The Hands

Arnaud’s day. He starts you with cappuccino at his favorite beach café — the one where the bartender knows how he takes it. (No cappuccino after eleven, Italian rule. He will explain.)

Then we come back to my kitchen for the first hands-on cooking class. Before we start, we walk into the vegetable and herb garden together and pick what we need. Rosemary, sage, a few tomatoes if it is summer, the soft inner leaves of a lettuce we planted in March. Whatever the season has given us. The basket is the recipe.

I teach the way Lina taught me. By feel. By tasting. By watching what the dough is doing and answering it. Pasta first — egg pasta, the way it is made in this house — then the sauce, then the dessert. Lunch lasts two hours.

In the afternoon, the second winery. Then the walking food tour of Castagneto Carducci, our village. The bakery. The butcher. The coffee roaster. The gelato Arnaud crosses the village for.

Dinner is the second cooking class, at our table. Often, on this night, a winemaker joins us. He pours his bottles alongside the dishes I have just taught you to make. By the end of the night, you have understood, with your hands and your mouth, that food and wine are not two things in this house. They are one.

IV. Belonging

We drive into the hills to a cheese farm — Rita and her family, who have been making pecorino the slow way for years and whose children we have watched grow up. You see the milk before it is cheese. You taste the cheese at every age. Lunch is at the farm. The view is the countryside.

In the afternoon, Volterra. A local guide meets us at the gate. Three thousand years inside one set of walls — Etruscan foundations, a Roman theatre, a medieval centre, the alabaster artisans still working as they have for centuries. The afternoon is unhurried. Volterra rewards walking slowly.

The farewell dinner is at the elegant restaurant owned by the Tenuta San Guido family — the family that makes Sassicaia. We will pour their wines. The kitchen is refined, the room is quiet, and the eight of you, who did not know each other on Sunday night, are now a small temporary household. You exchange addresses over coffee. You feel like a friend who happens to be here.

V. The Departure

Breakfast on the terrace, one last time. Then we drive you to the train, or to whatever onward transport you have arranged. This is the morning Arnaud has been filming, year after year, on the platform.

You will go home with a Tuscany of your own. Some guests come back three times. Some send photographs of the pasta they have made in their kitchens at home, years later. Some write at Christmas. The five days are over, but the friendship — the small one, the real one — has just begun.