We first conceived the idea for our travel and food site Grantourismo in the kitchen of my uncle's home in Australia in mid 2009. The name was a play on the Italian word for ‘grand touring’. The idea of 'the grand tour' always fascinated us and it was the style of travelling we’ve been doing since January 2006, when, with a slew of travel guidebooks and stories under our belts, and almost a year’s worth of contracts lined up, we embarked on a one-year travel experiment. We took to the road to live out of our suitcases, bouncing around the planet from project to project, spending months at a time in places, renting apartments and immersing ourselves in local life. A few years later, in my family's kitchen, we developed the idea for a website focused on 'slow, local and experiential travel', forms of travel that for us were more sustainable, ethical and responsible. Our lofty goal was to make travel 'more meaningful and more memorable'.
In 2010, in partnership with HomeAway, the world's top website for holiday rentals at the time (pre-Airbnb), we launched Grantourismo with a year-long grand tour of the world and our mission to explore more authentic and enriching ways of travelling by slowing down, living like locals, learning and doing things, and, wherever possible, giving back to the places we visited. Along the way, we changed the whole meaning of globetrotting and in the process redefined the way in which travel writers and bloggers worked. After the project finished, we resumed writing and shooting stories for magazines and newspapers, and authoring and updating travel guidebooks, but we also worked directly with travel companies, tourism boards and airlines on projects, and earned commissions when people used links on the site to book hotels, holiday homes and tours, rent vehicles, buy books, etc.
We lost that income in March 2020 when the world shut down and people stopped travelling. Which is why I started this page...