Enjoy the best of Italy’s early spring with Magari Tours

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One of the best times to visit Italy is between March and April. At Magari Tours, we invite our guests to travel with us during these months as they bring a sense of renewal and the arrival of early spring in Italy. It’s the perfect time to visit as the country emerges from winter. Not only is the climate ideal for touring with milder days and no crowds but it’s also when mother nature shows her abundance with an array of spring flowers and delicious seasonal produce.

Local landscapes come alive with vibrant green shoots and spring flowers, whilst local markets are laden with new season vegetables and fruit like artichokes, asparagus, spring peas, fava beans, leeks and strawberries. With all this fresh new produce, Magari guests can look forward to delicious light spring dishes using the freshest of ingredients.

Loved by Italians, the artichoke has a short season so many rush to add this delicious vegetable to trattoria menus and tasty home-made dishes. Used in soups and risottos, the popular vegetable is best cooked ‘carciofi alla guida’, the ancient Roman-Jewish way of tenderising and deep-frying artichoke. A wonderful and simple antipasto to celebrate the coming of spring.

Springtime visitors to Sicily can look out for traditional flavours including Frittella – a popular vegetable dish or pasta sauce made with fresh green fava beans, peas and artichoke hearts – at its best in mid-spring when these are freshly harvested.

Famed for its lush olive harvest later in the year, look out for olive trees in early stages of growth, developing new leaves and flower buds which burst out into crisp white blossoms later in spring. In Lombardy, an array of spring flowers appear. Starting with the soft colour of white daisies, the wildflowers of joyful primroses, and at the end of March, violets followed by the bold striking colours of tulips. Not forgetting the fragrant blooms of narcissus, and later in spring the brightly coloured gerberas.

The delicate cherry blossoms or ‘fiori di ciliegio’ in Italian generally bloom from late-March to mid-April bringing a sense of new life to the country. One of Sicily’s most famous local events in early March is the Almond Blossom Festival in Agrigento with a parade along the Valley of the Temples. Further north in Tuscany, early April sees the arrival of peach and apricot tree blossom, covering orchards in warm shades of pink and coral. As they disappear, cherry trees follow with snow-white blooms turning hillsides into perfect pictures against blue skies!