The Culture Discovery Story: From Villa to Vision

It All Began With Some Unexpected Guests...

Hi! We are Michael and Paola.
We founded Culture Discovery Vacations in 2006 as a way to bring to others the experiences we had shared with friends and family who visited us at our villa in Italy. When people travel, they usually see the sights, eat at recommended restaurants, check the boxes. But when our friends and family visited us, we introduced them to local friends, showed them hidden places that weren't in any guidebook, 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 that kind of travel before.

That simple difference in travel style became the seed that grew into Culture Discovery Vacations. We're different. Very different.

So read on. I'll tell you a little about us as people (from my perspective, Michael's), our history, and how Culture Discovery developed into what it is today.

First things first... Who are we?

I'm a Los Angeles native. I grew up in the Valley. Like, y'know... the valley, dude! In 1984, when I was 19, I took a trip to Italy. 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. Her name was Paola.

She was beautiful and vibrant, and she happened to be the only person around that spoke English. Over the next two years, we went back and forth between Los Angeles and Italy together while I learned to speak Italian. In 1986 we married. The decision was made that we would live in Los Angeles and spend our summers in Soriano nel Cimino, her hometown.

After we married, we started our family while living in Los Angeles. When we visited Italy, we stayed in a 350-year-old country house that had been in Paola's family since it was built. Paola's mother left the old house to us. It was in terrible disrepair, but over the years we worked on restoring it little by little until it developed into an amazing country villa. We named it Villa Eddarella after Paola's mother, who passed away just before the restoration began. The villa became our personal sanctuary, and we now spend nearly six months per year there.

Our Family

We have two wonderful children who enjoyed the kind of freedom in Soriano that they could never dream of back in the States. Our daughter, Alyssa, speaks fluent Italian. She got her degree in Hospitality Management, worked within the company for years, and then decided it wasn't her path. She went on to get her master's degree and climb the corporate ladder in HR. Our son, Andrei, decided that his mission in life is to teach English to everyone in Italy so that he doesn't have to speak Italian. Both of them live in Florida now, which is why we don't live in Italy year-round!

About Paola... She attended a linguistic-focused high school that left her speaking four languages, including near-perfect English. That's how 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 called Los Angeles.

She is a direct descendant of the Corsi family, one of the more important families in town for hundreds of years. Her grandfather was even a Knight. 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. During most of my years coming here, I was simply known as "The American." In the two years that I actually lived here full-time, I only encountered one other native English-speaking person.

Over the years I had started and run several companies. Most significantly, I was the founder and CEO of a well-known software company during the dot-com boom. The company grew considerably and we enjoyed a very comfortable life. We were even taking the company public in 1999. However, after the technology crash of 2000 and especially post-9/11, the company survived but it had taken quite a bit of fight out of me. We didn't know it yet, but Paola and I were ripe for a major change.

As I mentioned earlier, we often had friends and family visit us in Italy. When you have a villa in Italy, people always come out of the woodwork! When they would visit, it was usually part of a larger trip. They would do traditional travel (car and guidebook, cruise excursions, tours) in Italy, and during the trip they would plan some time with us at our villa.

While they were with us, we would do what people do when friends visit. We took them to our favorite restaurants, introduced them to our friends, cooked together and had parties, took them to meet our friend who makes olive oil. We would visit nearby towns, but not in a guidebook-tour way. Just as friends going out for a stroll, stopping in a cafe, enjoying time together. Instead of talking about the history of a particular building, we were more likely to talk about our personal connection to where we were. We were sharing our experience with our friends and family.

Absolutely every guest we had said the same thing. The time they spent with us was by far the most memorable part of their trip. They had no idea how good the food could be, what amazing things there are to see that cannot be found in the guidebooks, how incredibly warm and welcoming the people are when you get away from the touristy areas, what an amazing feeling it was to immerse in the culture rather than tour the sights. Absolutely everyone left in tears, and the common theme was that they felt like they were leaving home. Those who had more "touristy" travel ahead of them after staying with us always wanted to change their plans and just stay longer. When we would talk with them later, they always told us that during the rest of their trip they just wanted to go home to Soriano. We knew it wasn't specifically our town but rather the "insider's experience" we gave them.

The Unexpected Guests

Then at one point a timeshare group opened a hotel in our town. 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, 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. 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. We were certainly not tour guides, so we simply did exactly what we had always done with our own friends and family. We took them to some local ruins, grabbed some lunch, and invited them to our villa to spend the afternoon.

We had an amazing time. 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 turned an otherwise disappointing 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 really struck by this experience, and we had an idea. What if we bought some homes in town and offered them as vacation rentals? We would offer them weekly and provide all kinds of services that were lacking locally. We would give our guests the same experience our visiting friends and family got. Simply put, we would treat them the same way we treat all of 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.

It was instantly successful. Before our first guests even arrived, people began to ask us if we could arrange excursions for them with a guide. We figured, why not? To keep with our idea, we would simply take them places just as we always did with friends and family, rather than organizing traditional history tours.

People began to ask about Italian cooking classes. Why not? We figured the classes would not be academic in nature. Instead, it would just be like we have always done with friends and family. We would plan a little party and all cook together, just with a little more organization than we had done in the past.

Before we knew it, we found ourselves organizing these services for just about everyone. Our original tour launched - Wine and Cooking Under the Tuscan & Umbrian Sun - which is still to this day the beating heart and north star of CDV

Just as had always happened with our friends and family, our paying guests left with the same feelings and comments. They would leave in tears. They would have a sense of home. It was always the experience of a lifetime for them. Most importantly, because we treated them like old friends, they became friends, and we found ourselves absolutely loving what we were doing!

Discovering Our Formula

We quickly realized we were really on to something. 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, dinners in private homes with locals... all tied together by what we had always done. Those who came would be treated like friends and family, not customers, but in the truest sense.

With everything we did, we had to think: "How do we do this when our friends are visiting us?" 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 had to feel 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. If we went to a winery, it was more about visiting our friend who owned the winery than doing a classic wine tasting and tour. Everything we did had to be done through that lens.

It Worked!

To say we were wildly successful would be an understatement. We doubled our bookings between 2007 and 2008. Despite the global recession in 2008, our bookings doubled again. We experienced high double-digit growth every year, ultimately achieving TripAdvisor Hall of Fame status (top 0.004% globally) and the prestigious Magellan Gold Award by Travel Weekly for Service in 2025.

But perhaps the best indicator that our approach was working is the number of returning guests. Roughly 30% of our guests are returnees, with some having come back 8 to 10 times. In 2009 we founded the Alumni Groups, former guests who are willing to try out new ideas of ours and help us shake down new itineraries. When we have a new itinerary we intend to offer, they do dry runs with us and help us make our decisions. We now do one or two alumni trips a year.

We also have multiple reunions with our guests as we travel. We've had reunions in New Orleans, Palm Beach, Houston, Los Angeles, and Austin. In 2023 we started with our first reunion cruise, a transatlantic crossing from the United States to Italy, ending in an alumni week in Italy!

Finding the Right People to Grow With

As we added new and exciting locations, we began to seek out people more than places. Our trips are first about people, then about the place. We needed to find people in other areas who shared our values and vision. This was not an easy task because the tourism business is a machine, and it's difficult to find people who understand our vision and values. What we do is very counter-intuitive for people in the industry.

It isn't just about how to do the tours but how to plan them. When you plan a traditional tour itinerary, it takes days or a week at most. But ours take years because we do so many unusual things that are not part of the tourism machine. We need to build unique relationships and nurture them, and finding people with that kind of patience in this business is no easy task.

It was a long road, but in 2011 we opened our second location in the town of Norcia, in the heart of Umbria. It's a town that exists in the dreams of virtually every Italian but is largely unknown outside of Italy. In 2012 we opened in Sicily on the tiny island of Favignana, off of Sicily's west coast, another popular spot for Italians but unknown internationally. In 2013 we opened in northern Italy in the Barolo and Roero area of Piedmont, with weeks focused on some of Italy's most epic wines.

In 2014 we opened two locations. One on the Amalfi Coast, and one in Central Chianti, Tuscany. In 2015 we began CDV Classics, more traditional coach tours that stop at multiple points rather than our hub-and-spoke approach, with larger groups. Only we're doing it with our flair. In 2016 we opened our new location in Bologna, with a day in Venice, local cooking classes, a private tour of the Lamborghini factory, Parmesan cheese, Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, Parma Prosciutto, and much more!

2017 and 2018 were restructuring years in which we focused on all of our existing locations and relationships. In 2019 we opened a location in the city of Foligno, Umbria. We also offered a new Sicily vacation that travels and cooks throughout Sicily, and took our first step outside of Italy with an amazing location in Northern Portugal!

And then there was Covid!

The biggest challenge we could face became our greatest strength. Our financially conservative approach served us well, but more importantly, we stayed true to who we are. While every travel company scrambled to generate income, we focused on connection. Our team and thousands of past guests met regularly on Zoom, stayed connected on Facebook, joined weekly live-streamed cooking classes, and even attended our business meetings. Everything was open for all to see and participate. We were all in it together. After the two-year pause, we came back stronger than ever, thanks to our incredible guests! You can see the video about our Covid journey by clicking here.

We emerged from Covid stronger than ever, which enabled CDV to expand into new countries. We launched Croatia in 2024, followed by Spain and our ultra-small-ship luxury Croatia cruises in 2025. In 2026 we opened in South America with an immersive journey through Argentina and Uruguay, plus a new Spain trip centered around Catalonia. Currently we have several new destinations in development, including France, additional Italy trips, Madeira, Portugal, Iceland, and more.

Understanding What We Built

In 2025, we had the opportunity to document the philosophy we'd been living for 19 years. Our peer-reviewed research, "Existential Sustainability: A Structural Approach to Anti-Extractive Tourism," demonstrates how structural business constraints like zero commissions, volume caps, and local ownership requirements can prevent tourism extraction while remaining profitable.

Read the full research:
📄 View on SSRN
🌐 Visit ExistentialSustainability.com

Michael and Paola Today

After a decade of 16-hour days and 7-day weeks, our growth became such that we needed to make a decision to guarantee that Culture Discovery would never lose its charm and family feeling. After all, with 60+ groups per year in all these locations, there is a risk of losing who you are. We would sooner close our doors than become "just another tour company."

So we made a decision that many thought was crazy. We vested key people within CDV with significant ownership in the company. This way, those who have the most important jobs in our organization are all owners. It's no longer the Michael and Paola company but rather the Michael, Paola, Daniele, and Marta company.

We're still fully involved though. I remain the visionary of the company as the Chairman and CEO, keeping an eye on quality and new ideas! I'm also the guy behind the new cruises division. Paola remains active as Co-Chair and CFO.

All of these titles sound so official, but I'm not gonna lie... the reality is that we're just a big group of friends and family having fun together!

Paola and I now split our time between Italy and our winter home in Tampa, Florida. We still spend a great deal of time in Italy with our guests, and we bounce around quite a bit. We are generally in Italy between May and late October. When we are in Italy, we're usually at the Soriano location, so you will often see us at the villa or popping in and out here and there. Otherwise we're out and about scouting new locations, building relationships, and doing what we do.

Keeping it "Small"

With all of this growth, many have asked us if we are able to stay true to our roots. In a word, yes. We are very careful to find people who think like we do to work with us, and in just about every case there is a friends-and-family connection with every member of our team. Click here to read about the CDV Family.

No doubt we have grown significantly and continue to do so. But some companies are small and act big, while others are big but act small. We have no desire to lose our identity, and that is always front and center for us. Keeping small circles, close friends, and extreme transparency have allowed us to grow but still feel like a small company.

So when you come on any of our vacations, you may find Paola and me 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-and-pop operation.

On a given trip you may find Daniele, Marta, Maggie, Valeria, Francesco, Marika, Camilla, Ines, Valentina, Marta, Sophie, Linda, Claudia, Ivan and Betta, Luigi, or any of another hundred or so people that make up our extended family. All of them do it the way we did since the very beginning, and you are sure to fall in love with them.

People often ask specifically where we will be at a given time. The truth is, we don't know because we hop around so much. But the best shot at running into us is at home in Soriano, where it all started. That would be on our Wine and Cooking Under the Tuscan and Umbrian Sun trip, where we welcome all guests into our private home.

In fact, Paola and I have actually met many of our guests for the first time on Alumni trips! That is, they loved our team so much the first time without having met us that they came on another of our trips where they finally met us!

And if you read this far, I would love to share a glass of wine with you!

See you at the villa!

Michael