Our tour “Unique 8 days in Tuscany Adventure with a local” provided by Tuscany Untouched Tours seems to have been managed by Matteo Piccardi, who has received wonderful accolades for his previous tours where he was the local tour guide. For our specific tour, he was in Australia so did not participate directly in our day-to-day activities. Communication with him was via WhatsApp and that worked OK, and our interactions were mostly cordial. His driver and tour duties for our daily excursions were assigned to Emiliano most days, and to Paolo for one day.
Possibly due to Matteo’s absence in Australia, the actual tour organization was poor and our daily schedules did not proceed as advertised. Changes were made without informing us, and sites were missed. Numerous messages to Matteo from our group initially seemed ineffective. Also, our assigned hotel was not centrally located relative to our daily destinations, so we spent far too much time travelling to and from the various sites of interest. These journeys were made worse by our driver (Emiliano), whose high-speed driving in seriously wet road conditions while on his iPhone was stressful, and resulted in many muted screams of panic from his passengers.
Although the tour company’s webpage states “Unique 8 days in Tuscany Adventure with a local” includes accommodation, an expert guide, meals, transport and more, Emiliano was not a licensed “Tour Guide”, and so he was unable to provide any information on our daily excursions. He simply dropped us off at some location, disappeared for a few hours and then picked us up at a predetermined time and location. He was unable to specify in advance our arrival times at specific locations, so we were unable to book proper Tour Guides that were available at the major sites of interest. It would have been easy for Emiliano, and useful for us, if he could have dropped us off closer to Tourist Information Offices, or even if he could have provided tourist-style maps of our various destinations. One day, our driver was Paolo, who is described on the Tuscany Untouched Tours website as being a tour guide. While more informative than Emiliano, he really did not provide much detail.
The tour used the same accommodations (Residence La Ferriera) and adjacent restaurant (Ristorante la Ferriera) for the entire week (each reviewed separately). This was problematic as the hotel was cold and damp, and the food unappetizing. We felt trapped, but on several evenings, guests from our tour, as well as other tours, would escape into the local town (Loro Ciuffenna) where local restaurants provided far superior meals.
Our small group did complain to Matteo about tour organisation and poor meal quality, and I believe he tried to make changes. First, he made a final day addition of a winery visit (Agriturismo Tiberio) to compensate for a missed winery visit earlier in the week. That was a wonderful experience; indeed, a highlight of our week in Tuscany. We were hosted by Enzo, the owner and wine maker, who offered us abundant samples of five different wines, Grappa, his special olive oil, and his award-winning Vin Santo, along with bread, meats and cheeses in a rustic setting inside his facility surrounded by steel wine storage tanks, cages of wine bottles, and his bottling system. Second, I think via intervention from Matteo, the restaurant offered to make amends for the poor meals during the week by offering our group dinner selections on the final evening from the more expensive à la carte menu. So instead of going into the town for our final night group dinner, we cancelled our reservations at the much-appreciated previous location, and decided to give the hotel restaurant one final chance. What a mistake, the meals were no better – still the same types of cold plates and bland, tasteless food, but at least Matteo tried. I also discovered that he did provide refunds to some on the tour for the costs of meals taken in town, but we have received no such compensation.
This tour could have been a wonderful experience, but suffered by Matteo’s absence that resulted in poor organization, with activities not consistent with website information. That, in combination with unappetizing meals, and cold and damp accommodations are the reasons that my final verdict on Tuscany Untouched Tours is so low.