Hands On Travel is known for its “historic” tour products which started with our original Bella Italia Tour in 2002 and eventually growing to our current lineup of many various tour products. 

Yet, the world is a big place and there’s still so much to see that we haven’t even set up tours for. Every year, we are excited to research, produce and offer new tours for our loyal customers. 

This year, we offered Northern Italy for the first time. It is a great complement to our other two Italy tour products, Italy (Central) and Southern Italy & Greece. Northern Italy is a region that is booming in popularity as people want to see different parts of the country.

We are blessed to have a variety of local deaf guides all around Northern Italy which really gave the group a wide variety of exposure to local culture and language. 

This tour began in Milan seeing the highlights of the city including the Duomo, the site of the infamous 1880 conference, and Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. 

We then transferred to Turin to visit the Royal Palace and the unique city center. Then the rugged port city of Genoa. We learned to make pesto at a farm overseeing the famous Cinque Terre and the Mediterranean sea. We visited the Ferrari factory near Bologna with a local deaf person who works at Ferrari. We visited the deaf-owned bar in Bologna. 

We also swooned from Juliet’s Balcony in Verona and tried (but failed) to spot George Clooney at Lake Como. 

All in all it was a wonderful initiation to our new tour product and we look forward to always refining and improving it for years to come!