Sapori e Saperi Adventures
Inspiring culinary tours of life behind the scenes in rural Lucca in Tuscany, famous for its olive oil since Roman times. Our holidays and courses introduce amateurs and food professionals to food artisans and craftspeople. Travellers and students pick olives, watch them being pressed into oil, participate in guided tastings and learn typical Lucchese dishes using their new oil for a deeper appreciation and enjoyment of olive oil. |
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Founded in 2006 by Heather Jarman, whose early career as an archaeologist studying the early history of agriculture in Europe combined with her love of food and experience as a chef, led her to devise an entirely new type of rural travel in a little known area of Tuscany where food traditions are still handed down from one generation to the next. Tours and courses focus on seasonal foods and agricultural activities with olive oil as the protagonist from mid-October to mid-December. Sapori e Saperi’s mission is nothing less than to change people’s lives by changing the way they view the people who produce the food they cook and eat, while making tourism work to sustain the rural economy and its people. Our guests encounter an endangered lifestyle which we don’t want to disappear. |
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| Address | See map: Google Maps |
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| First Year in Business | 2006 |
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| Tours and/or Tasting Bar | ||
| We provide tours of our facilities | ||
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We organize tours of olive farms in rural Lucca. Guests have the opportunity to pick olives themselves and take them to the frantoio (olive press). They learn why it's important to press olives immediately, how to taste oil and how to buy quality oil when they get home. This hands-on experience is the best way to learn all about olives and olive oil. |
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| Name | Heather Jarman | ||
| Company | Sapori e Saperi Adventures | ||
| Title | Managing Director |
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Throughout Heather’s several careers eating, drinking and cooking have been abiding passions. As an archaeologist researching the early history of agriculture, Heather spent more time in Mediterranean markets and cooking for the excavators than in the trenches. While General Manager of the Academy of Ancient Music and Personal Manager of Christopher Hogwood, she researched and cooked sixteenth- to eighteenth-century feasts to suit the music performed at concerts. For the sheer joy of it, she cooked alternate Sundays at the Good Food Guide restaurant The Old Fire Engine House in Ely, disturbing the equilibrium by demanding unusual ingredients for historical English dishes. More interested in eating than publicity, Heather nevertheless did occasional programmes on eighteenth-century cuisine for the BBC and organized the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum into cooking their own seventeenth-century banquet. She was a founder member of the Cambridge Convivium of Slow Food, organized Neal’s Yard Dairy’s appearance at Slow Food Cheese in Bra, Italy, in September 2005 and their sold-out cheese workshops in London. None of this can compare in job satisfaction to introducing like-minded food-lovers to the traditional flavours and knowledge of Lucca and the Garfagnana. |
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