Plan Your Travel to Italy with the Experts

Visiting Italy for the first time? The fifteenth? Traveling with your sweetheart? With your extended family? Your best friends?

How do you make the best decisions when there are so many choices? What's the best time to go? Which cities should you visit? Where do you need to reserve ahead? What's the most convenient way to get around? How much will your trip cost?

Personalized trips to Italy are our speciality.

Let us answer your questions and inform your decisions. Together we will create an itinerary sure to please you and your fellow travelers. Tell us your tastes and interests. We will match them with suggested destinations, activities and accommodations.

Here's a small sample of what our travelers are enjoying on their Italy travels:

• Visiting Asti, the heart of Piedmont, for the oldest (and most fun) Palio in Italy. There's a parade of colorfully clad locals representing historical events and customs followed by the most exciting bareback horse races you can imagine.
• Glimpsing how the privileged classes live while gliding down Venice's Grand Canal in a private motor yacht. A local guide reveals fascinating details of the historic palaces passing before our eyes.
• Bicycling around Rome's most impressive monuments with a guide leading us on safe routes for a memorable tour of the Eternal City.
• Making authentic pizza with local cheese, tomatoes and salami in a country farmhouse kitchen in Umbria.
• Picking olives alongside local farmers and sharing in a communal feast for the seasonal helpers
• Swimming from our private yacht in the grottos around the idyllic island of Capri in the Bay of Naples
• Hanging out for the day at our private villa or farmhouse overlooking a postcard view of the Tuscan hills and vineyards
• Meeting the baron who manages the estate and winery of his family's property on the slopes of Mt. Etna, Sicily's still active volcano. Of course, our travelers enjoy lunch and taste the baron's wine, too.
• Coming home to their own castle retreat after a day of visiting the masterpieces of the Uffizi Galleries and shopping the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.
• Visiting a farm cooperative in the interior of Sardinia where one discovers the secrets of growing and harvesting the most expensive spice in the world.
• Celebrating a 50th wedding anniversary with several generations of the family in a sumptuous palace hotel, where our clients will have dinner on the terrace overlooking Lake Como

Italy offers all this and much more! Just imagine the most fascinating, fun and exciting trip of your life. We will make it happen.

Put our 20 years of creating custom Italy itineraries to work for you. Why settle for less when you can have the trip of your dreams to Italy? Get in touch with Great Travels today.

Email: italia@great-travels.com
Call: Patti Absher at 202-237-5220

Your Italy Travel Advisor

Patti Absher

Patti has been designing custom and small group tours to Italy for 20 years. She is a world traveler having lived abroad in Italy and also Thailand where she taught English as a Peace Corps Volunteer. She counts among her professional friends many guides, estate owners, vacation rental firms and hotel owners in Italy. To keep up with the constant changes in a dynamic country like Italy, she spends a month or more there every year. The last book she read was, "The Lost Painting," by Jonathan Harr, a true story of the discovery of a long-lost painting by Michelangelo Caravaggio. She delights in sharing her love and knowledge of Italy with curious travelers.