A free guide from Gay Up Travel
The Curator’s Edit:
Italy for Gay Travelers
Tuscany and Puglia, the way we tell them to our clients. Hotels, experiences, and the queer-cultural layer most travel guides miss — 14 pages, free, in your inbox.
What’s inside
This is a curated 14-page guide to two Italian regions written for gay travelers who care less about a “best of” list and more about how a trip is built.
Inside, you’ll find:
- — Two boutique stays I personally book my clients into: a restored nineteenth-century palace in central Florence, and a sixteenth-century fortified masseria five minutes outside Ostuni.
- — Four experiences I curate directly: a candlelit dinner in a Tuscan vineyard with the family that has owned the land for centuries; a closed-door morning in Florence’s artisan workshops; a working olive mill between Ostuni and Cisternino; an afternoon in Lecce that ends where the locals end it.
- — A queer-cultural layer for each region: the documented Renaissance queer history of Florence; the structural welcome of Salento towns.
- — One restaurant in each region worth the deviation. Including a recent Michelin entry twenty minutes from your masseria.
- — Plus a chapter on how GUT works, if you decide a trip would suit you.
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Two regions, two registers
TUSCANY
The familiar first chapter, peeled back.
Florence as a base — a nineteenth-century palace in Piazza dell’Indipendenza, run like a household. A vineyard dinner outside Siena with the seventh-generation family that keeps the land. A morning behind the closed doors of the Oltrarno artisan workshops. And the queer history layer that most travel guides skip entirely.
PUGLIA
Where the country shifts gears.
A sixteenth-century fortified masseria five minutes outside Ostuni — family-run, seven hectares, a kitchen that cooks what the family eats. A morning at a working olive mill between Ostuni and Cisternino. An afternoon in Lecce that ends at one of two queer-friendly bars the locals actually use. A dinner twenty minutes from your bed at the region’s most interesting new Michelin entry.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Francesco Mevoli
Founder, Gay Up Travel
I’m Italian, I live in Italy, and I founded GUT in 2021 because the trips I’d been planning for friends — quietly, the way you do when you grow up here and people keep asking — kept being more interesting than what the agencies were selling them. The reason wasn’t a secret list of hidden hotels. It was that I was paying attention to who was traveling, not just to where.
GUT is a boutique travel company built around that idea. Tailor-made trips for gay travelers, mostly to Italy and across Mediterranean Europe. No catalog, no off-the-shelf itineraries. One conversation, one trip at a time.
If a trip would suit you, I’d love to hear about it.
One last thing.
This guide is what we do, in PDF form. The actual product is a trip — built for you, on a phone call or an email chain that starts whenever you’d like it to.
The first conversation is free, and is genuinely worth your time even if you don’t end up booking. Most travelers come out of it with at least one idea they didn’t have when they started.