Hello everyone and greetings for the village of Radda in Chianti! I’m so excited to be writing again, and look forward to sharing our experience on the first annual Barrel33 Tour of Italy. Barrel33 has partnered with Niche Italy, a stour agency that specializes in creating custom tours of Italy and Sicily focused on wine and food. We plan to do a tour like this every year going forward. We have tentative plans to tour Sicily and Southern Italy in June of 2023, and hope to make an official announcement of the firm dates by the end of this current tour.

The tour started with an incredible day of touring the amazing city of Florence. We visited numerous museums, and took a guided walking tour of the city. Florence is on of the most beautiful and impressive cities I have ever visited in all my travels. So many of the architectural and artistic treasures from the renaissance era have been preserved beautifully, so you can view and appreciate them today. It was a tremendous benefit to have a local expert describing what we were seeing in clear English, and Niche Italy purchases all the museum tickets in advance, so you get to avoid the long lines and go straight in.

The thing that struck me the most about my time in Florence was that the city itself is essentially a living and breathing museum that pays tribute to one of the most important cultural eras in human history: The Renaissance. The amount of care and forethought it took for the people of Florence to preserve these treasures for so many centuries is something one can only truly appreciate by visiting the city. I feel so fortunate to have visited here, and especially to have Dana, our bi-lingual Tour Leader from Niche Italy, to help us understand and appreciate what we are seeing and doing as the 10 day tour progresses.

We begin visiting the wineries in the Chianti Classico region tomorrow, so stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog reviewing some of the wines and what we experienced at each winery!