Olga Golubeva
Rainy Day Rome: A Luxury Indoor Itinerary
A wet day in Rome is, for travellers, often a missed day. The luxury guest who has flown to Rome for five clear days and finds, on the third morning, that the forecast is rain through the next forty-eight hours, often surrenders the day to the hotel — or worse, to the shop. This is … Read more
The Vatican Jubilee 2025-2026: Holy Doors Pilgrim Itinerary
The Catholic Jubilee Year that opened on Christmas Eve 2024 and closes on the Epiphany of 2026 is the twenty-seventh ordinary Jubilee since the institution of the Holy Year by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300, and the first Jubilee since 2000 to follow the full set of pilgrim traditions. The Jubilee is, properly understood, a … Read more
Become a Roman Mosaicist: A Private Atelier Masterclass
Mosaic, in the Roman imagination, is a Pompeian floor or a Byzantine ceiling — a finished surface admired in a museum. The work itself — the cutting of marble tesserae from a slab with a hammer and a mallet, the laying of those tesserae into a bed of lime mortar, the slow making of a … Read more
The Italian Aperitivo Code: A Roman Sunset Ritual
The Italian aperitivo is a code. To order a Spritz at the wrong hour, to mistake an apericena for an aperitivo, to ask for a Negroni at the table reserved for the Negroni Sbagliato — these are not catastrophes, but they betray the visitor. The aperitivo is, in its proper Italian form, a forty-five-minute ritual … Read more
Roman Pizza Bianca Masterclass with a Master Pizzaiolo
Pizza in the Italian imagination is Neapolitan. The Romans, however, have a separate pizza tradition that pre-dates the Neapolitan version by a century — the pizza bianca, the long flat oil-and-salt bread that has been baked in Roman ovens since the 1880s and that, in its proper Roman form, is one of the great products … Read more
Amalfi Coast Premium One-Day From Rome (Positano · Ravello · Amalfi)
Doing the Amalfi Coast as a one-day trip from Rome is not, traditionally, recommended. Romans themselves treat the coast as a long weekend; tour operators present it as a two-day minimum; the guidebooks insist on three. We took the opposite position in 2019 — that with a 07:00 chauffeured departure, a high-speed run to the … Read more
Lake Nemi: Caligula’s Ships and Wild Strawberries
Lake Nemi — the smaller of the two volcanic crater lakes of the Castelli Romani, twenty-eight kilometres south of Rome — has been called the Mirror of Diana since the Augustan poets. The lake is a perfect circle, four hundred metres deep at its centre, ringed by holm-oak forest, and overlooked by the medieval village … Read more
Frascati Noble Villas Wine Day: Aldobrandini & Falconieri
Frascati, in the Roman imagination, is a white wine and a roadside trattoria. It is also — for those who can reach them — a small ring of the most extraordinary patrician summer villas of the seventeenth century, built by the Barberini, Aldobrandini, Borghese and Pamphili popes within sight of one another along a single … Read more
Castel Gandolfo & The Pope’s Summer Palace Gardens
Castel Gandolfo — a small medieval town twenty-five kilometres south of Rome, perched on the lip of the volcanic crater of Lake Albano — has been the summer residence of the popes since Urban VIII bought the medieval Castello Savelli in 1623. For three hundred and ninety years, the papal palace and its gardens were … Read more
The 3-Hour Rome Sprint: A Luxury Layover Itinerary
Travellers connecting through Rome with a four-hour layover at Fiumicino airport often dismiss the idea of seeing the city as impossible. They are wrong — but only by a narrow margin. The honest answer is that a Roman layover of less than four hours from gate to gate is impossible; a layover of four hours, … Read more