On the top floor of the restaurant Genevose, a man named Fabio, who had recently won the Genoa Pesto World Championship, was gently showing me how to grind basil leaves with a mortar and pestle. “Pesto is a balancing act,” he explained to me in Italian. The leaves must be smashed and not chopped for fear the blade of a knife will over-oxidize them. Salt must be added sparingly because of how much is already in the pecorino and the parmesan cheeses. These may sound like obvious points to any semi-experienced chef, but they were relayed to me with the utmost seriousness—and the final result did not disappoint. After all, we were in Genoa, the birthplace of pesto. Minutes later, our pesto (really, Fabio’s pesto) had been tossed with freshly made pasta, and we sat down to eat our lunch. Nutty, salty, and just a little sweet, the pesto was simple—and utterly perfect.
I was in the ancient port city thanks to Prior, a boutique travel agency, which was taking me on an Italian-focused trip entitled “Fatto a Mano.” The expression translates to “handmade” and Prior’s exclusive itinerary was developed entirely on this concept, whether that meant digging for truffles in the forested hills of Alba or visiting the medieval velvet looms in Venice, where workers still thread hundreds of wooden bobbins with silk threads themselves. “I’ve always wanted to create the possibility that you can read a travel story and have it actually come to life,” explains David Prior, the company’s founder, who hopes to expand the concept of the handmade across other countries over time.
With a past in editorial, following time spent in Italy at the pioneering University of Gastronomic Sciences founded by Slow Food champion, Carlo Petrini and traveling the world while working with Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, Prior understands that the art of connection and narrative—crucial for any travelogue—can elevate a good vacation to an unbelievable one. And as travel continues to grow around the world, the search of those who can genuinely connect a traveler to a person and a place with a sense of purpose and intimacy is becoming more valuable. His entire premise with the company is to combine his deep bench of contacts the world over with his own understated sense of luxury. Today, for an annual fee, Prior offers some of the most desirable travel experiences around (Emily Weiss and Gwyneth Paltrow are his clients), with dozens of curated trips to over a number of countries, including India, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, and elsewhere. This month, they launched partnership trips with Capital One featuring top global tastemakers including Jose Andres and food writer Rebekah Peppler.
For David Prior, travel is not just about consumption (though a five-star hotel never hurts), it’s about connecting to the heart and soul of a destination through its people, craft, and heritage. His approach to travel is highly unusual in an overly saturated field of travel specialists. He has partnered on trips and experiences with close friends such as Martina Mondadori, the founder of Cabana Magazine, whose beautiful apartment he took me to for an afternoon tea while we were in Milan. He is a regular on upscale circuits such as Milan’s Salone del Mobile, the leading design fair, held every year in Milan, and while we were there, he introduced me to some of Italy’s most prestigious and niche craftspeople, like Osanna Visconti, who makes beautiful bronze sculptural objects, and Marcantoni Brandolini, who runs the chic Venetian hand-blown glassware shop Laguna B. Due to his background, he has a deep bench of contacts with tour operators, hoteliers, specialists, and more. Want to stay at the newest boutique hotel that Rome has to offer? Want to book a palatial villa on the outskirts of Florence and ride horses through the foothills of Italy? Prior has you covered.
But back to that pesto. I’ve tried, now, on a number of occasions to recreate what Fabio made for me that day. But that’s the thing about travel. It can’t really be bottled. That basil was plucked from a nearby Ligurian hillside. That cheese freshly mined from a gorgeous wheel of parmesan. It’s not really possible to recreate what makes it so good, because what makes it good is an ephemeral, glorious understanding of life and the handmade, one that asks us to slow down, breathe, and appreciate what is in front of us. As a traveler, what more, in the end, can you ask for than that?
Prior membership costs $2,750 a year.