Michael & Paola (in Soriano)

Villa Eddarella

Alyssa (at The Amalfi Coast)

Andrei (in Pienza, Tuscany)

Paola (at Villa Eddarella)

Michael (at a Village Grocer)

Sara (in the Teaching Kitchen)

Hi! We are Michael and Paola, the people behind CultureDiscovery.com. Read on to find out a little about us (from Michael's perspective), our history, and how CultureDiscovery.com came to be.

First things first... Who are we? I (Michael) am a Los Angeles native. I grew up in the 'Valley'. In 1984, when I was 18, I took a trip to Italy, and during my travels I went to visit a friend of my mother's who had moved back to his hometown in Central Italy a couple years prior. I fell in love with the town, but more importantly, I fell in love with a girl in that town. She was beautiful and vibrant.. and she happened to be the only person around that spoke English. Over the next two years, we ended up going back and forth between Los Angeles and Italy together while I learned to speak Italian, and in 1986 we married. The decision was made that we would live in America and spend our summers in Soriano nel Cimino, her home town.

After we married, we took possession of a 380 year old country house that had been in Paola's family since it was built. Over the years, we have been working on restoring the house little by little, such that it has developed into an amazing country villa. We have named it 'Villa Eddarella' after Paola's mother. The house is our personal sanctuary, and we now spend between four and five months per year here.

We have two wonderful children who enjoy the kind of freedom here that they could never dream of back in in the states. Our daughter, Alyssa, speaks fluent Italian, and our son, Andrei, has decided that his mission in life it to teach English to everyone in Italy so that he doesn't have to speak Italian :-).

About Paola... She attended a linguistic-focused high school that left her speaking four languages, including near perfect English. As a result of her excellent English, she met me while I was on vacation in Italy. After a couple years we were married, and I took her away from this wonderful place to live in a traffic-infested megalopolis... Los Angeles.

She is a direct descendant of the Corsi family, who were one of the more important families in town for hundreds of years. During the time of Napoleon, her family emigrated from Corsica to Italy. They were land barons that owned much of the valley beneath Soriano. She is extremely proud of her hometown (rightfully so!) and can sit down and tell you stories about Soriano all day long that would keep you riveted.

For years Soriano was our secret. In fact, during most of my years coming here, I was quite simply 'The American', and the two years that I actually lived here, only once had I encountered an native English speaking person.

Then several years ago a timeshare group opened a hotel in our town that attracted mostly Brits and Americans. They brought in enough tourism to cause the town to offer basic services for tourists. As I would hang out in the Piazza (main square), I would often meet the guests and help them with the language barrier. As we got to know more and more of the tourists, they would tell us what they loved about the area, and what was left to be desired. All of them were absolutely in love with the town, the area, and its proximity to major destinations. They all felt that this was the hidden jewel of Italy, stunning and beautiful, while unspoiled by the floods of tourism. It is a place that has quick and easy access to major destinations like Rome, Florence, the Tuscany wineries, Orvieto, Assisi and much more. However, many said that they would like to have access to some of the comforts they are accustomed to. They wanted conveniences like air conditioning in their rooms, American coffee now and again, English books and movies, etc. Finally, many indicated that while they loved being off the beaten path, they had wished for access to more information like train schedules, places to see, where to get dry cleaning, internet access, etc.

Paola and I saw an opportunity. We realized for many years that while Italians had so much to offer, they rarely understand how important certain comforts can be to tourists. Even the best hotels in Italy missed the mark in many areas. So we set out to offer the best of both worlds. All of the raw beauty and history that Italy offers, with the various comforts that many non-Italians value. We bought several absolutely beautiful medieval village homes in Soriano, and fully appointed them, while making sure key services were available to our guests. What we came up with was a hybrid between traditional vacation rentals and a resort hotel. We offered all of the adventure you would get by getting off the beaten path in a private vacation home, while still offering many of the comforts you would get from a major hotel chain... at a fraction of the cost, and much more real.

We called this new company 'Discover Soriano', and launched DiscoverSoriano.com.

Not much time passed before guests began asking if they could get Italian cooking classes and tour guides while they were here, and before we knew it, we found ourselves organizing these services until we found ourselves doing this for just about everyone. With that in mind, in 2006 we began to package accommodations, tours and cooking classes into all-inclusive cooking and culinary tours. The plan was to limit it to small and intimate groups to maintain the family feeling that got us started in the first place. We started doing the cooking classes in our home kitchen, but the tour packages became so popular that we realized the need for something bigger. In 2007 we started a construction project that would add a stunning new 750 sq.ft. kitchen. After much delay (we are in Italy, after all) we began using the new kitchen for our classes in the summer of 2008.

In addition to the cooking tours, in 2008 we were also beginning to organize other tours that ventured into other parts of Italy. We had found a formula that was really working. People really wanted to experience the true culture when they went to Italy, yet they also wanted to see the touristy sites. They wanted to experience the best food Italy has to offer, and wanted to feel what it was like to see Italy through the eyes of local.

The formula was working so well, that despite the economic downturn in 2009 that ravaged the travel industry, we had a record year.

With that, we chose to expand on both our culinary tours and our escorted tours for 2010. In doing so, we realized that when we had started, our mission was to help our guests 'Discover Soriano', we had developed into an organization with a mission to help our guests 'Discover the True Italian Culture' as a whole, so we decided to change our name to something that more accurately reflects who we are...

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