About Cultured Voyages
Understanding changes experience.
For travellers drawn to the history, art, food and wine of a place – who like knowing why somewhere is the way it is, and would rather understand one place than rush through five.
The more deeply we understand the world, and ourselves, the more richly we experience both.
That is the idea Cultured Voyages is built on. I believe understanding is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and travel has taught me that time and time again.
A city becomes more meaningful when you understand the people who shaped it.
A meal tastes different when you understand the traditions behind it.
A painting becomes more moving when you know the story it was trying to tell.
What Cultured Voyages actually is
An independent European cultural travel publication, for people who want to understand the places they visit rather than only pass through them.
The opposite of that opening idea holds too. Without context it is easy to walk straight past the thing that makes a place extraordinary, and to come home having seen everything on the list and understood none of it.
That gap – between passing through somewhere and actually understanding it – is the one problem this site exists to close.
So you will find destination guides here, covering cities and regions across Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, written to help you plan properly. They are also built to do something the planning alone will not, which is to help you notice more once you are standing there.
Why this is different from most travel sites
Every guide here comes out of somewhere I have actually stayed – usually for weeks rather than days, and at the very least for longer than most people give it.
There is no content team here, and nothing on this site was briefed out to a freelancer who has not been.
I research, visit and write every guide myself, which is precisely why there are fewer of them than there might otherwise be.
Wherever I can, I go back before I write, and the places covered most closely here are ones I have returned to many times over. Somewhere small enough to be understood in a single careful visit gets exactly that – but where a place is too layered for one pass, I would rather leave it off the site than cover it thinly.
Most of what is here came out of extended stays rather than trips. A month based in Florence, another in Palermo, five weeks in the Provençal interior out of Aix and Avignon, two months in Seville. Long enough to stop being noticed as a visitor, which is roughly when a place starts behaving normally around you.
Photography has become a large part of the work over the last few years, and more than that, part of how I come to understand a place at all. Arriving somewhere with a camera sends me out looking for whatever makes it itself – the light, a detail, some ordinary scene that could not be anywhere else.
You cannot photograph the character of a place without first working out what that character is. There is a limit to how much of that I can carry in description alone, and the rest I would rather show you.
Most travel sites answer questions like:
You will find those answers here too.
I want to answer a different set as well:
Because understanding those things changes the experience of being there.
In practice that means art, history and heritage sit alongside the logistics; that food and wine are treated as a way into a region rather than a list of bookings; and that slow travel gets as much room as the cities, because some places only give themselves up to people who stay put.
And where I do not think something is worth your time, I say so. A guide that recommends everything gives you a longer list, not a clearer view.
The Cultured Voyages Edit
The method, written down
All of that comes down to seven decisions I now make on every trip. They are set out properly in The Art of Understanding Places, which arrives when you join The Cultured Voyages Edit – one email every second Wednesday on how to travel rather than where.
A little about me
I’m Isabelle – the writer, photographer and publisher behind Cultured Voyages, and at present the whole of it.
A lot of the places I write about now, I first saw as a child. I have my parents to thank for that.
My siblings and I were taken to culturally and historically rich places from early on, and I have been a voracious reader for as long as I have been able to read – historical fiction most of all.
Thinking back now, my childhood and teenage years gave clear signals as to where my talents and interests lay – my favourite subjects were always English, history and music.
Classically trained, I sang soprano in chamber choirs and played the piano too, yet I chose to turn my back on these when decisions needed to be made about my career and my future.
Instead, I undertook a dual degree in Business and Law at University College Dublin and followed the path that seemed preordained for me at that point.
I spent over a decade in the corporate world, in roles spanning contract management, bid management and sales operations across banking, fintech, law and enterprise software industries – and a fair portion of that time feeling like a square peg in a round hole.
As a creative and expressive person, that side of me felt starved in my corporate life.
I started Cultured Voyages in early 2021, while also juggling an extremely demanding role as a Senior Deal Manager at an S&P 500 technology company. The next 18 months passed in a blur, but by the end of 2022 I made Cultured Voyages my full-time job.
It is the first thing I have done that uses all of my experience to date – the research and the analysis from one life, the writing, the history and the looking from the other (and a good deal more besides).
Like most people, I used to think a good trip meant fitting as much in as possible.
Then several years of travelling – and later of living and working abroad for months at a time – slowed me down almost by accident.
I started returning to the same places, staying longer, walking the same streets every morning, finding a café worth going back to, and getting curious about the history behind the buildings I was photographing and the food I was eating.
Ironically, the less I tried to see, the more I noticed.
Two years of that took me around Europe, and the best part of another through South East Asia. Then, rather to my own surprise, back to Kilkenny.
It is a small medieval Irish city I once thought I had outgrown, and which turns out to be so layered in its own history that in hindsight I wonder why I left. It is home now, though a good part of the year is still spent in Europe, researching and returning.
I have also acquired an office assistant. Pippo is a chocolate-and-tan long-haired dachshund named after Filippo Brunelleschi, the engineer who worked out how to roof Florence’s cathedral when nobody else in the city could.
Which is as good an illustration as any of what all of this is about. Knowing that story is the difference between seeing bricks, mortar and a date on a plaque, and seeing fifty years of a city staring down an unsolvable problem.
Curiosity is enough
People often talk about culture as though you need to know something before you are allowed to enjoy it.
You do not need an art history degree to be moved by a Renaissance painting, or to know every grape variety before visiting a wine region, or to have studied history before walking through Rome or Palermo.
I would argue the opposite, in fact. Most of us did not fall in love with art or wine or history because we studied them first – something caught our attention, and the interest followed it.
Curiosity comes first. Understanding follows.
What I hope to do is help you notice the things that might otherwise pass you by.
Not because knowing more is the point, but because the more we understand, the more richly we experience the places we go.
You care less about ticking countries off a list than you once did.
You would rather spend another afternoon wandering than rush to another attraction.
You like learning, and you notice when somewhere is beautiful.
You find yourself wondering why a place feels the way it does.
You think travel can be about more than seeing somewhere new.
If that is you, you will feel at home here.
Welcome.
Where this carries on
The guides on this site are built for the weeks when you are planning something. The Edit is for the rest of the time.
One idea per issue, about how to travel rather than where to go, every second Wednesday.
Some issues take apart a belief I used to hold and no longer do. Others sit with a question I have not settled. It is where the questions on this page keep going.
Join and The Art of Understanding Places arrives straight away.
Join The Cultured Voyages Edit
Where to go next
Browse by
Destinations
Destination guides, itineraries and travel advice across Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Ireland – city breaks, road trips and something a little slower.
→ Browse destinations
Browse by
Interest
Art, history and heritage; food and wine; and the slower kind of European cultural travel that rewards staying in one place.
→ Browse by interest
I’d love to hear from you
Whether you’re a reader with a story to share, a fellow writer, or a brand that feels genuinely aligned with what I’m building, I’d love to hear from you.
I’m always happy to chat about:
You can get in touch via the Contact page or email me directly at:
isabelle@culturedvoyages.com