When we travel, we seek change and variety. And if life at home feels predictable or monotonous, we seek to dial things up in the dazzle and flare of the big places: the hip, the hype, the bucket-list monuments, the dance floors and the delicacies – a spinning sensory wheel of excitement. But life at […]

Food is not just sustenance in Italy — it’s language, lineage, theatre, conviviality, and the essential ingredient in the national identity. When people say Italian cuisine — often with that reverent little pause — they usually mean the familiar trinity of pizza, pasta, and meatballs. The images it conjures are cinematic: nonnas in flour-dusted aprons, […]

No doubt about it, this is a dream job. Even if there comes a point on every research trip when my inner traveler werewolf sprouts a hairy back and howls at the moon. One too many luxury hotel visits or carefully plated amuse-bouche pom poms and the revolt is inevitable. What’s the remedy? To the […]

Are you one of those cooks who tends to get distracted doing 300 things at once, and ends up burning some of your meals? If so, this dish is for you – here you intentionally burn your pasta (to a certain degree). You heard that right, my friend. Spaghetti all’Assassina, or killer pasta, has you […]

Trieste is a city that seems to have been unearthed from the bottom drawer of a well-travelled desk—forgotten for a while, perhaps, but still scented with ink, salt, and old ambition. Here, on the northeastern edge of Italy, I recently spent several days drinking in the atmosphere of this unique city with its Venetian, Slavic […]

Have you ever looked at a dog’s nose? I mean really studied it closely. It’s cold (most of the time), wet (generally) but the most fascinating thing about it is the texture, a kind of ‘scorched earth’ granularity. Go get your dog, if you have one and stare at that snoot… Now, what does it […]

In a sea of gondolas and fast motor boats, the Eolo — a fully restored Venetian bragozzo, or flat-bottom fishing boat, painted with the classic black and white decorations — proudly unfurls its trapezoidal rust-red sails to the winds: quite a proclamation, visually and conceptually, even from afar. Irreverent, you might think, yet very much […]

It’s hard to encapsulate the essence of a place in a single phrase. There are too many layers and complexities, flavours and voices, volumes and colours. But when I think of my latest trip to Florence, “the devil is in the details” comes to mind. I was caught up in a whirlwind of self-inflicted (and […]

In the gastronomic pantheon, hundreds of foods take their names from famous figures, spanning the whole alphabet from Eggs Benedict to Caesar Salad, Beef Wellington to Peach Melba. In Italy the most popular dish in such a category has to be the pizza Margherita, which, according to the legend, was created by Raffaele Esposito Brandi […]

There is a cluster of islands, right off the coast of Naples, that look like pebbles scattered in the sea by the hand of a giant. Some are big, some tiny, some just deserted rocks: Capri, Ischia, Procida, Li Galli (also called Le Sirenuse), Vivara, and many more… As myth has it, this is the […]

***20 December 2023: Please note that applications for these positions are now closed*** Trufflepig as a company was started by Trip Planners and is run by Trip Planners, and in a world of distractions and fads we maintain a single-minded focus on our core objective: planning great trips. Trufflepig’s Trip Planners are destination specialists and […]

To travel is to hold smelling salts to our senses, to go wide-eyed, to become hyper observant, run on sheer curiosity. I dive into a research trip scanning for the beauty, the stories, the connections between where I am now and other places I’ve been. I pick a local caffè to hear the morning gossip […]

Let’s play a little game. One city – Venice Seven questions Two possible answers each time: by boot or by boat. Ready? 1. What’s the best way to get lost? By foot. Venice is comprised of roughly 120 islands (the precise number depends on how you define an island), and 391 bridges. If you don’t […]

Meredith is back from a few weeks on research in Italy, with tales of a missed flight, loose knees, and pure flexibility. The world has changed, and we with it – the tempo is different, and in this makeshift podcast we try to capture a feeling, that thing we all chase when we leave our […]

With the advent of the digital era, many bemoaned the disappearance of books as physical objects and pointed to the dangers connected with such a possibility, for it might change the way we think.  So, these days, when a book becomes a literary case, that’s already cause for celebration. If that book is an art […]

Some foods are so intrinsically tied to a place that often they shed a light on its past vicissitude much better than any museums or monuments. One of them is cod: the consumption of this fish is widespread across several continents, from Russia, to Western Africa, from the Caribbean to England, to the point that […]