Si Italy tours

Name: Sandra Correa and Linda White

Business: Si Italy tours

How long has your business been operating?

Si Italy tours began life in 2000, so we’ve now been running tours in Italy for ten years.

What inspired you to start the business?

We’ve each had a long-term love affair with Italy; living there for extended periods, visiting often and developing strong relationships with people and places over at least 35 years. We were looking for a change in career direction after teaching Italian in the Victorian high school system; something that would use our passion, our skills and our knowledge of Italy: the language, culture, history, traditions, food and wine. This is perfect!

Do you travel regularly to Europe?

Si Italy tours offers a brochure programme of at least 5 different tours each year as well as designing and guiding customized tours for interest, friendship and family groups.  As one of us leads each tour, it means that we each get to Italy once or twice each year, often running successive tours.

Are any other family members involved in the business?

Our success in providing guests with authentic and valuable travel experiences relies a lot on Italian friends and family, people like Ettore who is both alpine guide and expert polenta cook, Modesta who is well-known to our Slow Food guests as the ‘queen of canederli’, Angie our Italy-based guide and entertainer. Also, Linda’s son Jemi is a graphic designer and worked on our logo, brochures, website, business cards and advertising materials since we began Si Italy tours.

What do you enjoy most about running this kind of business?

Undoubtedly the satisfaction of being very good at what we do and the privilege of showing our guests the Italy we adore. Seeing them fall in love with it too. Keeping in touch with so many of our guests long after the tours have been and gone.

Do you have any funny/memorable/inspirational memories of the business to share with us?

Notte in Bianco, Saturday 27 September 2003. We’d just arrived in Rome for the start of our Rome/Cinque Terre/Tuscany walking tour, had dinner, and started our night walk.  Our progress was slow as the streets were packed with happy Romans celebrating Notte in Bianco - party night, the night when no one sleeps.

Loud rock bands were playing in Stazione Termini, the floodlit Roman Forum was teeming with sightseers, and ‘La Dolce Vita’ was screening on the backdrop of the Trevi Fountain.  We jetlagged Australians staggered off to bed just as a storm broke around midnight.  We had to catch the early-morning Eurostar train to the Cinque Terre.  At three o’clock that morning the power went off all over Italy.  By six it was still off and, given our date with a train, we thought we’d better go to Stazione Termini to see what was happening as none of the phones in the hotel were working.  At Termini chaos reigned, supervised by men in uniforms (railway officials, carabinieri, poliziotti, vigili).  We were told that there was a national power blackout and this was confirmed by friends whom we contacted in the north of Italy.  There would be no trains arriving or departing in the foreseeable future as carriages, full of revellers returning home, were blocking tunnels all around Rome.

This presented a small problem – what to do with 18 people who should be checking out of the hotel at any moment and whose first class train tickets to their next hotel in Liguria were useless since there were no trains operating.  Hire a bus?  Tried that – none available.  Organise a bus from our next destination to collect us?  Tried that – major roads blocked to traffic.  Feed our guests?  Difficult - restaurants closed due to power failure.

In the end the solution presented itself.  As the next night’s booked guests couldn’t arrive in Rome there were rooms for us to stay in our hotel for an extra night.  An enterprising owner of a nearby restaurant found a big gas burner and opened his door to serve a limited menu of pasta.  Several prosecchi (a light, bubbly wine) during the day created a festive atmosphere among our group, all of whom enthusiastically entered into the unexpected drama and excitement of the day.

Precisely 24 hours after they’d gone out the lights came on. Within a short time train lines were cleared, services returned to normal, and, apart from a frantic rush for seats on crowded trains, our tour proceeded to Liguria as planned, just a day later than expected.

Why should travellers consider Si Italy tours for their next holiday to Europe?

On a Si Italy tour, our guests get the very best out of their travel experience, seeing much more than they ever could travelling alone, and without the anxieties and time wasting irritants that can plague the independent traveller – Which train, Which platform? Where to eat or stay? What to see? How to get there?