About Michael & Paola -- And How we ended up doing this.

Welcome to Culture Discovery!

Hi! We are Michael and Paola. We founded Culture Discovery Vacations in 2006 as a way to bring to others the experiences we had brought to our friends and family that visited us at our villa in Italy. When people travel, they usually see the sights, eat at recommended restaurants, etc., but when our friends and family visited us, we introduced them to local friends, showed them off the beaten path places, cooked together, ate at amazing local restaurants, and really brought them into the local lifestyle. Every time they would leave, they told us they had just experienced something transformational. They felt like they had found a new second home... a sense of belonging. They had never experienced anything like that kind of travel before. All of this is at the core of what we are about, because that simple difference in travel style was the bud that became Culture Discovery Vacations. We're different. Very different.

So read on and we will start off by telling you a little about us as people (from Michael's perspective), our history, and how Culture Discovery developed into what it is today.

First things first... Who are we?

I (Michael) am a Los Angeles native. I grew up in the 'Valley' (Like, y'know.. the valley, dude!). 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 (Paola). 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 went on to start our family while living in Los Angeles. When we visited Italy, we stayed in a 380 year old country house that had been in Paola's family since it was built. Paola's mother left the old house to us, which was in terrible disrepair. But over the years, we have been working on restoring it 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 five and six months per year here.

Our Family

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 is 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.

In the Beginning

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.

Over the years I had started and ran several companies. Most significantly, I was the founder and CEO of a well-known "DOT COM" software company. The company grew considerably over the years, and we enjoyed a very comfortable life. However, after the technology crash of 2000 (and especially post 9/11), times got a little more difficult, and while the company survived the crash, it had taken quite a bit of my fight out of me. We didn't know it yet, but Paola and I were ripe for a major change in our lives.

Around the same time, a timeshare group opened a hotel in our town in Italy. This brought in a limited amount of tourism, mostly Americans and British. The hotel offered very little in terms of services, and while the town had adapted to its new international visitors to some extent, much was left to be desired. We found ourselves often helping out the tourists in town, giving them pointers, and acting as an unofficial point of reference for many of them when they felt lost. Then one day we were sitting and chatting with some of the tourists in town, and they really conveyed a sense of loss for not knowing what to do. So Paola and I took them under our wings for a day and took them out on an excursion, the same way we would always do with our own friends and family. We took them to some local ruins, then grabbed some lunch and invited them to our villa to spend the afternoon.

We had an amazing time, and when they left to go home a few days later, we found a very large arrangement of flowers at the gate of our villa with a card signed by all of them that brought us to tears. We had made an otherwise bad vacation into the best of their lives... and they felt a sense of belonging and family for it. We had no idea at the time, but that was the beginning of what would one day become Culture Discovery Vacations.

The Summer of 2006

Paola and I were struck by this, and we had an idea. What if we would buy some homes in town and offer them as vacation rentals? We would offer them weekly, and offer services that were lacking locally, all kinds of help for our guests, and we would give the same experience our visiting friends and family got. Simply put, we would treat them the same way we treat our visitors... like family, not clients. So we went ahead and bought a few homes and started a new company. Since we were in a town called Soriano, we called it "Discover Soriano" and created DiscoverSoriano.com. That was the summer of 2006.

It was instantly successful, and before our first guests even arrived, people began to ask us if they could get Italian cooking classes and tour guides while they were here. Before we knew it, we found ourselves organizing these services until we found ourselves doing this for just about everyone.

We very quickly realized we were on to something, so we put it all together. We had a formula. Cooking classes, excursions to famous sites as well as hidden treasures, immersion into the local culture, unique hands-on experiences, small groups.... all tied together by what we had always done: Those that come would be treated like friends and family, not customers.... but in the truest sense. With everything we do, we had to think: "How do we do this when our friends are visiting us?". So it had to always be all-inclusive, because we would never ask a friend to pick up a tab. When we would go out on excursions, it would have to be like a group of friends going out, not like a classic 'tour of the sights'. When we did our cooking classes, they needed to feel more like a group of friends cooking. Everything we did had to be done through that lens.

It worked!

We were wildly successful. We doubled our bookings between 2007 and 2008. Despite the global recession in 2008, our bookings doubled again. We grew 60% in 2009, 57% in 2010, and we nearly doubled again in 2011. The best indicator that our approach was working was the number of returning guests. In 2009 we founded the Alumni Groups –former guests who are willing to try out new ideas of ours and shake down the itinerary with us. In other words, when we have a new itinerary we intend to maket, they do dry runs with us and help us make our decisions. We now do one or two a year.

As we grew, we realized that we had done something significant. We had stumbled on a way of traveling that was truly unique, and we needed to expand it to new areas with the same formula and same values. With that thought in mind, we decided to change our name to "Culture Discovery Vacations" in order to better reflect who we are.

And Here We Grow Again...

In 2011 we began to offer vacations in our second base location: The town of Norcia in the heart of Umbria, a town that is in the dreams of virtually every Italian, but is largely unknown outside of Italy. In 2012, we will be starting a new base in Sicily on the tiny island of Favignana, off of Sicily's west coast... another popular spot for Italians, but unknown internationally. We are also working to start a fourth location in Northern Italy, right in the heart of Barolo Wine Country. Beyond 2012, we are actively working on locations outside of Italy. Among them are weeks based on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, off the beaten path. We are even working on weeks based in New Orleans!

With all of this growth, many have asked us if we are able to stay true to our roots. In a word, yes. While Paola and I are still based out of Soriano most of the time, we also bounce between the other locations. More importantly, however, we are very careful to find people that think like we do to work with us. So when you come on any of our vacations, you may find Paola and myself there with a huge smile greeting you, or you may find close friends of ours with the same beliefs, same values, and same love for friendship and true culture that we have. In other words, we may have grown, but we still have the feeling of a Mom & Pop ;-)