Welcome to the new Grantourismo Website!

Welcome to the new Grantourismo Website! The re-design has been a long time coming, but we really sweated the details. We’ve given more prominence to our photography, introduced a cleaner, contemporary look, and reorganized our stories and guides so they’re easier to find. We’d love to know what you think.

As photography is half of what Terence and I do as a writer-photographer team, we wanted to better showcase his stunning images and also give you more of a feel for the places we’ve loved to experience and inspire you to explore them as well.

We’ve also introduced a cleaner and more contemporary look and feel, something we should have done a long time ago, except we’ve just been so busy. As previously, we’ve kept the site on the WordPress platform – and we’re so glad we started on the platform back in 2009 when the ‘blogging’ landscape included so many other choices that have mostly folded up.

On the technical side, it’s a responsive and high-res design that should look fantastic on any device.

Apart from the new visual design, there are other structural changes to help you locate what you want more easily.

The destination content has been organised by region and country to form guides that we hope will be more helpful when you’re planning your trips.

There’s also an additional menu bar at the top for readers who don’t know where they’re going but want some inspiration. We’ve re-organized our stories under the themes that drive our own travels: Slow, Local and Experiential.

When we established the site at the end of 2009 we said our focuses were going to be Slow and Sustainable Travel, Local Travel, and Experiential Travel, but for simplicity’s sake and because there’s a lot of overlap we’ve combined the ‘slow’ and ‘sustainable’ under ‘Slow’.

See ‘Slow’ for everything food and wine drives and road trips and reviews on boutique hotels, holiday houses and apartment rentals. In ‘Shop’ we cover everything from local markets to farmer’s markets and under ‘Cook’ we’ve filed all our recipes from our series Weekend Eggs, The Dish and a Year of Asian Cookbooks, along with stories on cooking classes and tips from chefs.

See ‘Local’ for our stories on Local Travel, which for us is about prioritising local experiences over seeing sights, engaging with locals, hanging out in local neighbourhoods and attempting to learn to live like locals or at least get an insight into their everyday lives.

You’ll find stories on everything from local festivals to people we’ve met under ‘Meet’ while under ‘Absorb’ there’s a collection of stories on absorbing the local culture of places through art, street art, architecture, music, dance, performance, pop culture, and sport, as an observer, listener and participant, that I hope you’ll enjoy dipping into.

See ‘Experiential’ for stories on things to do and learn around the world, for travellers who want to do more than tick off sights and want to get beneath the skin of a place through more immersive experiences. Here you’ll find posts on cooking courses, wine tastings, painting classes, guitar lessons, walks, and tours.

Under ‘Resources’, you’ll find a motley selection of stories, from practical guides, itineraries and service pieces offering our best tips to experiencing places to longer narratives that we hope will serve as inspiration for your next trip.

One thing that hasn’t changed on Grantourismo is that everything you find here has been written and photographed by us, and all of our stories, guides, itineraries, and reviews have been based on our firsthand experiences. We won’t write about or recommend anything that we haven’t tried ourselves.

Hope you like the new look. More changes ahead for Grantourismo as it approaches its 5th birthday in 2015!