I have young children, making it difficult for me to jet off to any research destination when I need to, but for the Colline del Prosecco, the setting of A Taste of Italian Sunshine, the May/June half-term (which we call the Pentecost holidays where I live in Bavaria) proved very useful and I managed to squeeze in a research trip while writing! My husband had to work for part of the time, but I just booked an advance ticket for the long train journey (kids travel free in Germany and Austria, which is just amazing!), found a very reasonably-priced holiday apartment and dragged my three kids (then 10, 8 and 5) down to Conegliano.
If we were going to have arguments about how much screen time they were allowed on holidays anyway, I’d rather we have those arguments on the train! And they were easy to convince to come along to a wine region when I showed them photos of the Piave river, where we would be able to paddle, and we found out that a gelateria was only fifty metres from our apartment!
Needless to say I didn’t actually drink much prosecco, although I did manage to do some tastings. We had plenty of adventures, trying to get to the supermarket on foot (the farm shop was closer in the end) and working out when the buses ran. We accidentally walked 12km when the hike in the hills was only supposed to be 6! But the destination of that walk was the Osteria Senz’Oste, a very special spot in the hills for tasting prosecco (more about that in a separate blog post because it’s so gorgeous up there). It was worth the walk (and they got two scoops of ice cream that day)!
We also hit a heat wave and the temperatures soared to 32 degrees, which was great for our trips down to the river, but not so good for motivating kids to walk in the hills. But they were richly rewarded with Pizza Pepe, which makes a very good ‘party size’ pizza for the whole family. A highlight of the trip was also the longer tasting we did after my husband joined us at the winery Col del Lupo, which has a programme for families, with a sensory game for children and a wine tasting for the adults. I think we shocked them by turning up on foot, but we had a lovely time in the shade by their tank shed chatting about prosecco while our kids played with their dogs.
Having the kids along (and being outnumbered by them) also drew attention to us, which was actually really lovely. Older people often wanted to talk to me (with varying amounts of success due to the language barrier) and we had plenty of offers of help with bags and finding our way etc, particularly when I was on my own with them. Children are treasures to the people in Veneto and I certainly experienced that first-hand, bringing mine. The experience coloured the way I wrote A Taste of Italian Sunshine, which includes a baptism and lots of family.
While I was capturing the magic of the place in A Taste of Italian Sunshine, we were also writing a chapter into our book of family holidays that we’ll always treasure.