This Women’s Group Walked Lake Como to Tuscany — and We Want to Tell You About Them

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There is a way to do northern Italy that almost nobody attempts any more. It is slow. It uses trains and small boats and a lot of walking. It involves staying in the same town for three or four nights instead of one. It treats Lake Como and Tuscany not as photo stops but as places to actually live in for a week each. We came across a small-group women’s travel company that has built a trip along exactly those lines — Lake Como down to Tuscany — and we wanted to tell you about them, because it is the kind of trip our readers ask about and almost no one operates well.

Kindred Women Travelers is a small, values-driven outfit run by Maryann from Plainville, Massachusetts. They build small-group trips for women — six or eight at a time, shared accommodations, no chain hotels, no checklist tourism. Their Italy itinerary has already run; the next confirmed trip on the calendar is Scotland in 2026. We hope another Italy run is coming, because the model is the right one for this country.

Why Lake Como to Tuscany is the right north-Italy route

Lake Como is the gateway to two Italys. Stay on it for three days and you understand the alpine half — the gardens of Villa Carlotta, the boats from Bellagio to Varenna, the way the mist hangs over the water in the early morning before the day-trippers arrive. Then move south, slowly, into Tuscany — the Val d’Orcia, the hill towns, the long lunches that turn into long afternoons. Done in eight days, with the right planner, that route is one of the great trips in Europe. Done badly, in three days with a tour bus, it is a blur.

Kindred’s Italy trip leaned hard into the slow version. Cooking classes. Time in markets. Shared accommodations rather than impersonal hotels. The kind of pace that lets a group of women actually talk to each other and to the people they meet along the way. We have not run this exact trip, but the format — values-driven, small-group, women-only, off-the-beaten-path — is the one we recommend most to readers who write in asking how to do Italy properly.

What “values-driven” actually means here

Kindred says it directly on their site: they care about sustainability, social and racial justice, and the impact travel has on the places it touches. In practice, in Italy, that translates into choices we wish more operators made. Locally owned agriturismi rather than international chains. Family-run trattorias rather than tourist menus. Smaller groups so that places like Bellagio and Pienza do not feel the strain of yet another coach unloading. If you have ever felt slightly uncomfortable about the volume of tourism in northern Italy and what it does to the towns that receive it, this is the model that addresses that head-on.

If you want in on the next one

The 2026 calendar is Scotland. We do not know yet what 2027 looks like, but the right move — if Italy is the trip you want — is to get on Maryann’s radar now. Small-group operators of this size build their lists from people who reach out and stay in touch. A note to her saying “I would love to know when the next Italy is happening” is exactly the kind of thing she will remember a year from now when she is filling the next eight seats.

This is not a sponsored piece. We came across Kindred Women Travelers, liked what we saw, and wanted to introduce them to the kind of reader of this site who would love what they do. Tell Maryann that Love Italy sent you.

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