Bespoke itineraries, sassy guides, off-the-beaten-track attractions and gourmet meals… who would have thought all this could be at your fingertips on a coach tour – yes, a coach tour – through Italy or France?
In the south of France, an ingenious ribbon of road known as the Via Aurelia has been trodden, ridden, charioteered and traded upon by more than two millennia’s worth of humanity. In the time of Christ, every 30 kilometres or so of it yielded rest stops and chariot service stations. Five centuries later, hordes of barbarians traversed it, leaving terror in their wake. In recent times, the modern Impressionist painter Cézanne gazed out his window at the unique silhouette of Mont Sainte-Victoire looming above this landscape, and immortalised it in countless works of art.
More recently, Brad and Angelina have frequented this stretch of highway – nowadays only loosely based on the original Roman via – commuting between their leased chateau near Aix-en-Provence and the bright lights of Cannes.
Today, I’m experiencing the road firsthand, zipping through the countryside on a trip with Trafalgar Tours. And that means we’re on a bus. Well, on a coach, actually, and a fairly sizeable one at that – which means that this staunchly anti-coach-tour correspondent is in the belly of the beast and is rapidly having her mind changed about the whole affair.
All the smiles on the faces of silver-haired travellers and naïve, sunny-eyed honeymooners from 1980s bus-tour brochures that have so coloured my views on this sort of thing are giving way to the slow realisation that guided holidays, as they’re now known, can provide a whole new level of relaxation – a level made possible only by such cunning tactics as pre-arranged “sleep-in” days and prepaid porters everywhere you go.
Moreover, having a locally based guide loaded with impressive contacts and an agenda – that of showing you exclusive “Hidden Treasures,” as the brochures call them – means that actually, you’re ahead of the game and earning your traveller stripes without having to heft a suitcase once.
What can I say? I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid: I’ve tried out two coach tours around southern Europe to see exactly what happens on your average bus … um, guided holiday.
Paris and Provence
Let’s join this one just as the tour takes off for the countryside via a high-speed TGV train from Paris’ Gare de Lyon. Our three days in the French capital passed full of city-lights tours, reception dinners at fabled restaurants, and boxes and boxes of multi-hued Ladurée macarons, all of which have been fed to us with joyful abandon by our dashing tour director, Jonathan.
The morning start has given me the first taste of tour travel: leaving my suitcase outside my hotel room door for collection, I have blissfully bypassed check-out and next see my luggage sailing by me on a buggy at the railway station just as we settle in to order coffee at the acclaimed Le Train Bleu bistro. Jonathan explains the arcane vagaries of French train travel in an amused drawl, leaving me relieved I’m not travelling solo for this one. We board under his guidance, with time for photos and some gentle flirtation with the rakishly dressed train conductors; I note how much more coy one can be without luggage to drag around.
Two-and-a-half hours of impossibly green fields, hillocks and lifting fog later, we are in Avignon, aboard a giant bus once more and on our way through the fruit bowl of France.
We whizz past rows of apple and peach trees hemmed between chrysanthemum farms and almond plantations. Everywhere I look, I spot the remains of old Roman aqueducts and signs for lavender farms; every mas (traditional Provençal farmhouse) seems to compete in charm with the next, and I realise that I’m going to become one of those tiresome people who waxes lyrical about Provence. It turns out that every word in every flowery novel, and every frame of every romantic soft-focus movie about the region is frustratingly true. It is a film set of a place.
Our lunch stop comes, and I learn something else about coach excursions. Imagining school-camp-quality meals in built-for-tours roadhouses that locals wouldn’t touch with a two-week-old baguette, I’m delighted to sit down instead to a three-course meal at Le Jardin du Quai, Michelin-starred chef Daniel Hebet’s beautiful hideaway restaurant in the heart of the Venice of Provence, L’isle sur la Sorgue. The chef himself gathers our group and teaches us how to make the dessert we all adored: perfectly pink macarons.
“Everybody wants to know what’s behind the door, and this is our way of opening it,” Jonathan explains later on, about the tour company’s concept of getting behind the scenes. Trafalgar calls them “Be My Guest” experiences, and they’re now a part of a large number of its itineraries. “It’s not enough taking people to Paris and up the Eiffel Tower anymore,” Jonathan continues. “People want something truly genuine, to immerse themselves in the culture.”
I experience this again as we travel out into the Luberon countryside next day, our bus trundling along Provençal laneways with varying degrees of ease towards a vineyard, winery and family home. The gold-and-green undulations of the property at Chateau La Dorgonne are as gentle as our hosts, the
famille Parmentier, who are far from being tour-hardened entrepreneurs.
We are taken around the winemaking vats and barrel-ageing rooms before being fed homemade vegetable terrine and entertained by the family dog, who’s trying his paw at fishing in the pond, with the heart-stopping landscapes of the fertile Luberon mountains and valleys as a backdrop. This is not how I imagined coach touring – but after a few glasses of wine in the sunshine, I’m certainly grateful for the bus part of proceedings, enjoying a quick siesta in transit to a dinner of locally caught
truite aux amandes and more sampling of the region’s rightfully applauded syrah.
If all those macarons and glasses of wine sound like a heart attack in the making, you might want to consider heading farther south to pursue a slightly healthier lifestyle.
Flavours of Italy
In fact, jumping on board the “Flavours of Italy” tour brings us right into Trafalgar Tours’ “Tuscan Lifestyle Experience”: a day spent with local chef Libero, shopping for produce in the markets near Florence’s Santa Croce before preparing our midday meal back in the busy kitchen of his restaurant.
I Tre Pini sits in the hills of Chianti, on the southern skirt of Florence, in a meticulously renovated farmhouse that once served as a rest stop for weary travellers. Today’s visitors – doubtless a lot less weary – are giggling and hopelessly covered in flour, wearing aprons and chefs’ hats. We stir gigantic steaming pots of sweet, chunky soups made from tomatoes, herbs and bread, and roll out long ribbons of soft pasta
fatta in casa (homemade), pressing cheese and herbs inside dough shaped into crescents.
Across Italy, the food is so regionally distinct that the concept of an “Italian” restaurant, as such, seems absurd. Tuscan cuisine, in particular, is traditionally “peasant” food, based largely on seasonal vegetables, bread and pasta, with meat only making a guest appearance every now and then. Libero tells us stories about bread that make us laugh, such as the one about how, centuries back, the tax on salt was increased so the stubborn Florentine people simply refused to use it anymore – hence, the city’s traditionally unsalted bread.
Here, simplicity and perfect ingredients rule everywhere from the finest restaurant to the most casual roadhouse – as we find out at our own rest stop on the Rome–Florence motorway, part of Italy’s A1, the Autostrada del Sole (“Motorway of the Sun”). Forget burgers and fries: we load our trays with just-picked vegetables and fist-sized balls of buffalo mozzarella so fresh that the soft insides collapse in a creamy avalanche at the first cut. There’s no tomato sauce or salt and pepper but instead, a dozen or so bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. And then there’s the whole pig on a spit, ready to carve for peckish truckies on the go…
It’s all too easy to relax into the Tuscan rhythm of life, and it’s heartening to realise that this itinerary allows it to happen. A sleep-in at the elegant Villa Il Poggiale – one of the oldest of its kind in the area, perched on a hill overlooking Chianti – is followed by a casual stroll through our guide’s favourite “Hidden Treasure,” the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte, a small but beautifully decorated church set high above the cityscape of Florence.
There’s plenty of free time to stare longingly at store after store of leather handbags and gloves, or take an optional side-trip with an art-history expert to see Michelangelo’s David.
Then it’s on in the general direction of Rome, our bags taken care of and our check-out non-existent yet again, with lunch waiting for us once more along the way – this time, with Count Francesco Miari Fulcis and his gracious family at their expansive olive estate. We hear that Francesco’s wife hails from the Corsini family, the coat of arms of which graces the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and that boasts a prince and a pope among its noble lineage. We explore the family’s aristocratic villa, reminiscent of a small Italian Versailles, overlooking 150-year-old olive trees and hills pockmarked with very large holes. Our guide explains that this is where people once sourced the stone to build Florence and I reel from an overwhelming sense of history – certainly, I’ve been taken further and deeper into Italy than I could ever have managed alone.
Then lunch is on the table, served by the Count’s own children: course after course of fresh, homemade Tuscan food, heavily dosed with the olive oil di casa and served under the ancient timber beams of the storage room, the green patchwork landscape of Chianti stretched out below us.
And the ancient Romans thought they were civilised. •
Photography by Jac Taylor.
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