What did the extended Roads & Kingdoms family learn in the hills of Emilia-Romagna? Let’s start with these eight simple rules for travel.
Over five days in February, we gathered in a rainy, bucolic corner of Italy to think about the future of this small but tenacious shapeshifting organization. Of the many questions we asked ourselves over the course of the retreat, some were easy to answer, like is there such a thing as too much piadina? Incontrovertibly, there is. Others were more complex, like how does an independent media company stay viable amid the thrashing tumult of Trump-era late capitalism? Unresolved.
But mostly we looked at what it means for us to bring Roads & Kingdoms into the travel arena, to translate our ethos, worldview, and voice into this beautiful, variegated world of travel we’ve been building over the past few years. What does a League of Travelers journey look like and what makes it special? Like all great and foolish truth-seekers, we used ourselves as guinea pigs. Here are some conclusions derived from the week’s experiments.
Rule 1: Start with a clear sense of what you want. Then take it from there. In our case, the idea was to bring together a group of people spread quite literally all over the world, from Shanghai to Bogotá to Luanda to Porto, for what the more corporate inclined among us might refer to as “team building.” Being a veteran foreign correspondent and one of the most seasoned travelers any of us have ever met, head honcho Nathan Thornburgh did the only reasonable thing. He fed our locations into ChatGPT and asked it where we should meet. From “near Milan,” it was an easy pivot to turn things over to our man in Italy, the esteemed writer Eugenio Signoroni, consummate host and living Wunderkammer of Italian culinary knowledge.
Rule 2: Don’t skimp on accommodation. We’re not talking luxury but character, vibe, hedonistic comforts, an element of surprise. We found all of that in excess at La Campanara, an osteria and inn situated in the tiny village of Pianetto (population: 80) in the hills of Emilia-Romagna about an hour and a half outside Bologna. There, up a precipitous alleyway, within a stone complex built in the 15th century at the site of a miraculously lactating Madonna effigy, Roberto Casamenti and Alessandra Bazzocchi have conjured a level of Romagnola hospitality that is nothing short of revelatory. From Alessandra’s kitchen emerge new miracles: tagliatelle, tortelli, mortadella. Dreamlike polenta. Proustian soups simmered over days. And then there’s Roberto working the front of the house—disarmingly jocular, warm beyond measure—arising from the mystery-shrouded cellar with mind-blowing salumi and other edible contraband. With a homebase like that, it was hard to go awry.
Rule 3: Get to know your fellow travelers. There were, of course, the OG’s: R&K co-founders Nathan Thornburgh, Matt Goulding, and Doug Hughmanick. They spoke about the origins of R&K, how it started as a Tumblr, how everything changed the moment Anthony Bourdain threw his hat in the ring, kicking off a prolific collaboration with a man whose absence cast a faint but enormous shadow over the week’s proceedings.
Some of us trace our connections to R&K’s early days, either as contributors or interview subjects or collaborators. But more of us joined since the League of Travelers came into existence at the prodding of José Andrés as the sun rose on R&K’s dark night of the soul (Matt and Nathan discussed that watershed moment on the last one-night-only episode of The Trip podcast). We were 26 people spanning 14 countries, six continents, and wildly different backgrounds, but we very quickly felt like family, united around the idea of creating, in the eloquent words of food writer and League guide Rafa Tonon, “living journalism.”
Rule 4: Learn something new. Or in our case, many things (this was a work retreat, after all). Anissa Helou, renowned cookbook author and guide of our trips in Morocco and Puglia, shared observations from her recent travels in Syria, her ancestral home, which is showing promising signs of recovery since the fall of Assad. Inshallah there may be a League journey to Syria in our future. We learned about the art of the recon from Andy Ricker, who in addition to being a celebrated chef and restaurateur is a master of those exploratory missions that become the foundation of new journeys. We walked the glorious town of Ravenna with food-writing icon and League guide Katie Parla, whose narrative gifts make you feel like you’re binge-watching medieval Italian history, and Alejo Sabugo, a former producer and fixer for Bourdain, shared how he approaches each journey like a television or film production—involving the locals, greasing wheels appropriately, planning for every calamity.
Rule 5: Roll with the punches. Speaking of calamity, shit happens. Every time. And our retreat was no exception. It rained almost constantly, eventually turning to snow in the highlands above Santa Sofia and driving us out of our B&B in the hills. Google Maps lied about driving times (this is why we do recons), so we had work sessions in the bus and procured a karaoke machine. Some might have thought it was a bad idea for our head of marketing and resident sommelier Maria Vallès Beneit to bring her four-month-old on a five-day work retreat, but guess what? Baby Dora was the best thing that happened to us, with the possible exception of Matt Goulding’s spectacular bus rendition of “It’s Tricky,” which will live rent-free in our minds until we die.
Rule 6: Keep the spigots on. This will not come as a surprise to our loyal readers. We drank a tremendous amount of wine, not only from Roberto’s storied cellar. There was also smuggled chacha—as much of it as Natia Svanidze, our guide in Georgia, was able to cram into her suitcase between gift bags of adjika and glamorous apparel—and other sundry spirits, though sadly none from the wonderful Sông Cái Distillery, as founders Daniel Nguyen and Nhung Trang, designers and guides of our Vietnam trip, have learned the hard way not to risk confiscation (suspiciously, Natia doesn’t seem to have this problem).
Rule 7: Don’t avoid hard truths. Moments of unvarnished reflection were legion but reached critical mass on the final day, which Nathan subtly titled, “Making the World Less Fucked.” Mere hours after we opened our phones to see the cartographical farse of the “Gulf of America,” Ro Vazquez was talking to us about how she founded her pioneering company Eat Like a Local in part to create a space in Mexico for ethical food tourism as an alternative to some of the more degrading manifestations increasingly popular with visitors from the United States (“They would be looking down, like, ‘Oh, these poor people.” And I’m like, ‘Dude, you don’t even have healthcare’”).
Rule 8: Embrace moments of poignancy. We had plenty, but none more poignant than Cláudio Silva’s barn burner of a talk at the end of our unfuck-the-world day about moving from Angola to the United States as a child and what the country’s current flourishing means not just for Angolans but for the world. We’ll be adapting that one into an essay in advance of our maiden journey to Angola this June, so you’ll have to stay tuned to find out what made more than one of us cry like Baby Dora.
On the final night, Nathan and Natia shared the role of tamada, that essential Georgian word for toastmaster, and things got a bit out of hand. We drank to our hosts, to each other, to the future, and to our beautiful, shared mission that we are foolish enough to believe might make the world a little less fucked. But the last moment of poignancy came from stoic Asturian legend Alejo Sabugo, who raised a glass to the room and said what was on everyone’s mind: “Can we please stop toasting ourselves now?”