Can the itinerary be extended to include Alba?

Absolutely — the Langhe and Alba's famous white truffle fair can be added as a two or three-day extension from Florence, either by train or private vehicle. It makes for a natural Italy-wide truffle journey covering both the Piedmontese and Tuscan-Umbrian traditions.

What is the pricing structure for bespoke tours?

Bespoke itineraries are priced individually based on your travel dates, group size, accommodation choices, and specific requests. Complete the planning form and a specialist will send a personalised proposal within one business day — no obligation.

8-Day Bespoke Journey

The Truffle Hunter's Italy

Black truffles in Norcia, white truffles in San Miniato, Brunello in Montalcino.

Available as Private Semi-Private Self-Guided

From €4,290 per person 8 days / 7 nights

View Itinerary

Tour Overview

8 days across Italy.

Italy has been cultivating truffles since the Romans, but the knowledge of where to find them — and how to coax them from the ground — has always been kept within families. This eight-day journey moves through Umbria and Tuscany during the height of the truffle season: the black winter truffle of Norcia, the Scorzone summer truffle of Spoleto, and, in October and November, the white truffle of San Miniato that attracts buyers from Tokyo and Paris. You will walk through oak forests before dawn with a truffle hunter and his Lagotto Romagnolo, attend one of Italy's most serious truffle markets, sit with winemakers and chefs who have built their lives around these extraordinary ingredients, and eat some of the most purely flavoured meals of your life. This is an itinerary for travellers who take food as seriously as landscape.

Detailed Itinerary

Your journey, day by day.

Every day is designed with breathing room. Sleep in, take a detour, linger at lunch — the itinerary flexes around you, not the other way around.

Day 1

Arrival in Rome

The city before the forest.

Your private driver meets you at Rome Fiumicino and carries you to your hotel in the historic centre — Prati or the area near Piazza Navona, close enough to walk to the Campo de' Fiori market that will make sense later when you understand how Rome shops for food. The evening is yours: the neighbourhood trattorias near the Pantheon serve the Roman canon — cacio e pepe, rigatoni alla carbonara, artichokes alla giudia — and the white wines of the Castelli Romani are cold and inexpensive. Your travel specialist has left a short list of places that don't advertise on the tourist trail. Tomorrow the drive north begins.

Private airport transfer to central Rome
Campo de' Fiori neighbourhood at leisure
Evening in Rome's old centre

5★ hotel, Rome historic centre

Day 2

The Road North: Into Umbria

Spoleto and the first truffles.

After breakfast, your driver heads north on the Via Flaminia — the ancient Roman road to the Apennines — into Umbria. Spoleto announces itself from twenty kilometres away: a medieval hill town on a dramatic rocky outcrop, its Roman theatre and Lombard cathedral unchanged for nine centuries. You arrive in time for a late-morning walk through the market, where the first truffle vendors of the season are already set up with their Scorzone summer truffles and, in autumn, the first precious Tuber melanosporum. Lunch at a trattoria overlooking the valley: pasta with truffle shavings, Spoleto's own black celery, and the inky Sagrantino of nearby Montefalco. The afternoon is for wandering: the Duomo's Filippo Lippi frescoes, the Ponte delle Torri aqueduct suspended above a forested gorge. Dinner in a quiet piazza at the top of town.

Morning market with first truffle vendors
Truffle pasta lunch with Sagrantino wine
Spoleto's Romanesque Duomo and Lippi frescoes
Ponte delle Torri medieval aqueduct

Meals: Breakfast 4★ boutique hotel, Spoleto

Day 3

Norcia: The Black Truffle Capital

Forest, dog, and the most celebrated fungus in Italy.

You leave Spoleto before first light. Norcia sits high in the Sibillini mountains in a valley that produces more Tuber melanosporum — the black Périgord truffle — than almost anywhere else on earth, and the town has built an entire culture around cured meats and truffles that predates tourism by centuries. Your truffle hunter, whose family has worked these forests for four generations, meets you at a farmhouse on the edge of the oak woodland. His Lagotto Romagnolo — a breed used exclusively for this purpose in Italy — sets off into the trees with absolute purpose. Within an hour, the dog signals: a shallow dig reveals the black, rough-skinned globe. The hunt continues for another ninety minutes. Back at the farmhouse, the truffles are cleaned, weighed, and handed to the cook. Lunch is entirely built around the morning's harvest: bruschetta with fresh truffle, scrambled eggs with black truffle, tagliatelle with butter and truffle. In the afternoon, the Norcia market: the town's famous butchers, the truffle merchants with their winter supplies, the pecorino and salami that the whole of central Italy comes here to buy.

Private truffle hunt with fourth-generation hunter and trained Lagotto
Fresh truffle lunch at the farmhouse
Norcia's famous market: butchers, truffle merchants, pecorino
Sibillini mountain landscape

Meals: Breakfast 4★ hotel, Norcia

Day 4

Perugia & Sagrantino Country

The medieval capital and Italy's most tannic wine.

Perugia is Umbria's capital — a city of serious medieval streets, one of Italy's oldest universities, and the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, whose paintings by Perugino and Pinturicchio explain everything about the Umbrian school that shaped Raphael. Your guide leads you through the corso, past the Fontana Maggiore and into the Collegio del Cambio, where Perugino's frescoes cover every wall of the 15th-century exchange hall. In the afternoon, the drive south to Montefalco for a private tasting at one of the Sagrantino estates: the wine requires four years of aging by law and has a tannin structure unlike anything grown in Tuscany. The winemaker takes you through the vineyards and then into the cellar for a barrel tasting. Dinner in Perugia that evening — the city's restaurants run later and more seriously than anywhere else in Umbria.

Perugia's medieval corso and Fontana Maggiore
Perugino frescoes in the Collegio del Cambio
Private Sagrantino estate tasting in Montefalco
Barrel tasting and vineyard walk

Meals: Breakfast 4★ hotel, Perugia

Day 5

Into Tuscany: Siena

The rival city and its extraordinary cuisine.

The drive from Perugia into Tuscany takes two hours through landscapes that seem to have been painted rather than made: rolling hills with lone cypress trees on their ridges, white gravel roads between vineyards, hilltowns visible from thirty kilometres away. Siena announces itself with its extraordinary Gothic cathedral striped in green and white marble. Your guide meets you after lunch at the Piazza del Campo — the scallop-shaped square where the Palio horse race runs twice a year on the bare earth — and takes you through the Palazzo Pubblico's extraordinary mediaeval paintings, Simone Martini's Maestà and Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government: a 14th-century public building whose frescoed walls argue that good civic leadership produces flourishing cities. The afternoon is for the narrow streets: the Contrade, the pasticcerie selling ricciarelli and panforte, the wine bar with Montalcino's Brunello open by the glass. Dinner in a trattoria: wild boar ragu on pici, pigeon with juniper, cantucci and vin santo.

Piazza del Campo — Siena's extraordinary Gothic square
Private guided Palazzo Pubblico with Lorenzetti frescoes
Siena's Contrade and medieval food shops
Wild boar, pici and Brunello dinner

Meals: Breakfast 5★ hotel, Siena

Day 6

Montalcino & Brunello

The hill town that makes Italy's most serious red wine.

Montalcino sits on a ridge above the Orcia valley — a small hill town that happens to produce Brunello di Montalcino, legally Italy's most rigorously regulated wine and one of the world's great reds. Your access today is exceptional: a private visit to one of the traditional estates where the owner walks you through the Sangiovese Grosso vineyards, explains the microclimate differences between the northern and southern slopes of the hill, and then takes you into the cellar for a barrel tasting of the current vintage aging in Slavonian oak. Lunch at the estate: pasta with the estate's black truffle, cheese from the local caseificio, a vertical tasting of three vintages of their Brunello. The afternoon is free in Montalcino itself: the mediaeval fortress, the enoteca inside it where you can taste almost any producer's wine by the glass, and the view from the walls over the Val d'Orcia to Monte Amiata. Drive back to Siena for the evening.

Private Brunello estate: vineyard walk, barrel tasting, vertical flight
Truffle pasta lunch at the estate
Montalcino's medieval fortress and enoteca
Val d'Orcia views from the town walls

Meals: Breakfast 5★ hotel, Siena

Day 7

San Miniato & the White Truffle

The truffle that perfumers cannot replicate.

San Miniato is a hilltop town between Florence and Pisa that the food world knows for one reason: the Tuber magnatum, the white truffle, grows in the clay soils of its surrounding forests in greater concentration than almost anywhere outside Alba. In October and November, the Fiera del Tartufo di San Miniato draws buyers from every serious kitchen in Europe and Japan. Your morning begins in the forest again: a pre-dawn walk with a local tartufaio whose knowledge of these hills is generational. The scent of the white truffle — musky, garlicky, impossible to describe fully — is something that changes how you understand Italian cuisine. By midmorning you are at the fair itself, examining specimens that sell for thousands of euros per kilo, tasting small portions on toast with nothing else. Lunch at a restaurant in the town above: tajarin with white truffle, a risotto finished at the table. You arrive in Florence in the late afternoon — the Arno and its bridges visible from your hotel room window.

Pre-dawn white truffle hunt in San Miniato's forests
San Miniato Truffle Fair (October–November)
White truffle tasting — Tuber magnatum
Truffle lunch: tajarin and risotto with fresh shavings

Meals: Breakfast 5★ hotel, Florence

Day 8

Florence & Departure

One last morning in one of the world's great cities.

Florence is the last stop and offers the morning at leisure — the Mercato Centrale in the San Lorenzo neighbourhood if you want to carry some of the week's discoveries home: truffle salt, aged balsamic, tinned porcini, Colonnata lard. The Uffizi if you haven't been, or the Oltrarno neighbourhood across the Arno for the artisan workshops and the Brancacci Chapel's Masaccio frescoes, which changed Western painting. Your driver transfers you to Florence airport or Santa Maria Novella station at your agreed time. A few days later, your travel specialist will be in touch — and it is very likely you will have questions about how to recreate at least one dish from the past eight days.

Mercato Centrale — provisions to take home
Optional: Uffizi or Brancacci Chapel
Private transfer to Florence airport or station

Meals: Breakfast

Where You'll Stay

Hand-picked hotels, every night.

We choose properties for character, location, and the kind of service that makes you feel looked after — not just checked in. Every hotel can be swapped for an alternative if you prefer.

Rome

1 night

5★ hotel, historic centre

Near Pantheon / Piazza Navona

Walking distance to Campo de' Fiori and the old city

Spoleto

1 night

4★ boutique hotel

Upper town, medieval centre

Views over the Umbrian valley; within walking distance of the Duomo

Norcia

1 night

4★ hotel

Town centre

Close to the truffle market and the famous butchers of Norcia

Perugia

1 night

4★ hotel

Historic centre

On or near the corso, walking distance to the Galleria Nazionale

Siena

2 nights

5★ hotel

Within the city walls

Intra-mural Siena; the Piazza del Campo is a five-minute walk

Florence

1 night

5★ hotel

Near the Arno

Central Florence; Ponte Vecchio, Uffizi, and Santa Croce all walkable

Hotels shown are indicative of the standard we book. Upon request, we will provide a detailed itinerary with specific hotel options tailored to your preferences and budget.

What's in the Price

Included

7 nights in 4–5★ hotels and boutique properties
Daily breakfast at your hotel
Private truffle hunt in Norcia with hunter and Lagotto Romagnolo
San Miniato Truffle Fair visit and tasting
Private Brunello estate visit with barrel tasting and vertical
Private Sagrantino estate visit in Montefalco
Expert private guides in Spoleto, Perugia, and Siena
All private vehicle transfers throughout
All entrance fees for included visits
24/7 travel specialist support throughout your trip
Hamilton & Chase digital travel booklet with chef and producer contacts

Not Included

International flights to/from Rome or Florence
Travel insurance (required — we can arrange coverage on request)
Meals not listed in the itinerary
Truffle purchases at the fair (prices vary significantly by season)
Personal expenses and additional wine purchases
Gratuities for guides and drivers (optional but appreciated)

Good to Know

Truffle season varies by year: the black Scorzone runs July–November, the Tuber melanosporum from November–March, and the white truffle (Tuber magnatum) from October–December. Your specialist will advise on the best timing for your travel dates.
The San Miniato Truffle Fair takes place on three weekends in November — if your dates don't coincide, we substitute a private truffle market visit and tasting in Florence.
All guides, hunts, and meals are arranged exclusively for your group.
This itinerary can be adjusted to start and finish in Florence if preferred.
Truffle hunting is subject to weather — we always have indoor alternatives arranged.

Make It Yours

Optional add-ons & upgrades.

Every trip is different. These extras can be woven into your itinerary — just let your travel specialist know what catches your eye.

Truffle cooking class in Norcia

A half-day class with a local chef: black truffle on pasta, risotto, eggs — learning the techniques that let the truffle speak for itself

Price on Request

Private cellar access in Barolo (extension)

A two-day extension northward to the Langhe for a private barrel tasting at a Barolo estate during the October harvest

Price on Request

Florence Uffizi after-hours visit

The Uffizi Gallery in the evening after closing, with a private guide and the Botticellis entirely to yourself

Price on Request

Helicopter transfer Rome–Spoleto

Arrive in Umbria from above, with a fifty-minute panorama of the Apennines before landing in the Spoleto valley

Price on Request

"The truffle hunt in Norcia was the most purely wonderful thing we have done in thirty years of travelling. The cook at the farmhouse made the simplest scrambled eggs with shavings from that morning's truffles — we have been trying to recreate it ever since. Hamilton & Chase understood exactly what we were after."

Richard & Catherine M.

Edinburgh, Scotland · The Truffle Hunter's Italy, November 2024

Common Questions

Questions about this trip.

Can we bring truffles home?

Fresh truffles can generally be carried in hand luggage within the EU and to the UK. For the US and Australia, regulations are stricter — your specialist will advise on what is permissible. Truffle products (oils, salts, preserves) travel easily anywhere.

Is November the best month for this trip?

For the white truffle of San Miniato and the peak of the Fiera, yes — late October through mid-November. For black truffle, November through February is the prime season. September and October offer a combination of both types plus excellent autumn weather. Your specialist will help you choose based on your travel dates.

Bespoke Journey

The Truffle Hunter's Italy

8 days / 7 nights

From €4,290

per person

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