September to November
Autumn is when the country around Rome is busiest and emptiest at the same time — everybody is working and nobody is on holiday.
40 things to book18 placesthe nearest is in Rome itself
If you get to choose when you visit Rome, choose autumn. The heat has gone, the crowds have gone with it, and the country outside the city is in the one part of its year when it is actually doing something. Grapes come in around September, olives from late autumn, chestnuts in between.
You can join both harvests as a visitor. It is real work for about an hour, at which point you will have opinions about people who do it all week, and then it turns into eating: new wine straight from the vat, oil so fresh it burns your throat, bread over a fire.
The dates move every year, because they depend on the weather rather than the calendar — which is why the good estates announce the harvest a fortnight before rather than selling tickets in March. Each card carries the operator's own number for exactly this reason.
A harvest day is not a demonstration. You will be given a crate or a net and you will do the same job as everybody else for about an hour, which is exactly long enough to develop a permanent respect for people who do it from dawn. Then it stops being work and becomes lunch, which is the part the family has been planning.
The two harvests want different clothes and different expectations. Grapes are warm work at the end of summer, low down, sticky, with wasps; wear short sleeves you do not mind and take a hat. Olives are cold work in late autumn, up ladders and under nets, and the reward is oil poured over bread toasted on a fire in front of you, which is a completely different thing from oil out of a bottle.
Grape picking, olive picking, and the meals that follow them. Most of these exist only in this part of the year; truffle hunting runs longer but peaks alongside them.
Best fit for this section first, then whatever you can book today. Closest to Rome breaks a tie. Never by who pays us.
With your handsA hands-on day picking olives in the Sabina hills, followed by sorting and selecting the fruit to be sent for milling.
See the day
With your handsCut the grapes yourself. The window opens 1 September and shuts 15 October.
€40 per person
Books on Casale Mattia
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With your handsPick olives all morning; lunch and a bottle of their own oil come with the day.
€65 per person
Books on Olive Hill Sabina
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With your handsWhere to look, what to pick and how, first in theory and then out in the field; how to clean and keep wild greens and what to do with them in the kitchen.
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With your handsPicking aromatic herbs on the farm with an explanation of their uses, then grinding them into flavoured salts with mortar and pestle.
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On horsebackA walk through the chestnut woods in the company of donkeys that live free in the forest, with a visit to the rock hermitage of San Leonardo and a tasting of organic jams.
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With your handsFrom late September to early November the estate opens the harvest to visitors: a morning of picking olives by hand for its own extra virgin oil, from eight until noon, ending w…
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With your handsMeet at the station, follow the dog into the wood, dig up what it finds.
€72 per person
Books on Farm Experiences & Tours
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With your handsThey collect you at your Rome hotel; you come back having made lunch by hand.
€250 per person
Books on Villa Proietti
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With your handsA walk through an organic olive grove with the farmer, covering the farming year from pruning to harvest, then an interactive tasting of four Italian extra virgin olive oils led…
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With your handsA mill in Farnese, on the Canino DOP side of the Tuscia, shows the stages of production from harvest through milling to bottling, then runs a guided tasting of its extra virgin …
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With your handsA morning in the apiary inside the Veio regional park: watching how the bees live and work, then a guided tasting of several honeys, millefiori, chestnut and honeydew, led by th…
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In the hot waterThe second thermal park at Fiuggi, also called Fonte Nova, laid out among sequoias, chestnut trees, small bridges, ponds and flower beds.
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On horsebackAn hour on horseback in the Parco dei Castelli Romani with a certified guide, leaving from Via Sicilia at Rocca di Papa.
See the dayCellars are working, the vines are turning colour, and the terraces are still warm enough to sit on. The Castelli, the Cesanese hills and the Tuscia.
Best fit for this section first, then whatever you can book today. Closest to Rome breaks a tie. Never by who pays us.
With your handsMake the pasta at a Frascati winery: 22 minutes by train, picked up at the station.
€109 per person
Books on farmexperiencestours.com
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With your handsBe there for the 8:30 milking and the 9:00 curd: the timetable is the tour.
€15 per person
Books on agricolacirce.it
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With your handsA private visit that starts in the vineyard and ends in the eighteenth-century rooms of the estate, led by a dedicated sommelier or by the owners.
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With your handsA guided tour of a Frascati winery built around a 16th-century villa, including the vineyards and the historic volcanic cave used as a cellar, followed by a tasting.
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With your handsA family estate on the edge of Frascati that makes Frascati wine and extra-virgin olive oil and has a page of its own devoted to events and tastings, alongside pages on the cell…
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With your handsA walk through the vineyard, then the cellar and the barrel room of an organic Frascati estate, ending with a guided tasting of four De Sanctis wines.
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With your handsAn organic estate on the hills at Frascati working the native Frascati DOCG grapes — Malvasia del Lazio, Greco Bianco, Bombino.
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With your handsThe short version: fifteen minutes by train to Tor Vergata, five on foot to the farmhouse, a walk among the vines with views back towards Rome, and three Frascati wines paired w…
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With your handsA driver meets you at Frascati station, takes you to a sixteenth-century family vineyard for a tasting of three boutique wines with snacks, then a guided walk through Frascati a…
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With your handsFifteen minutes by train from Rome: a walk through the vineyard with a local guide, then a hands-on class where you cook traditional Frascati dishes and the local wine cookies w…
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With your handsA guided walk through the historic centre of Frascati tasting slow-roasted pork and jug wine, then a pizza lesson with a master pizzaiolo: you make your own, eat it with antipas…
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With your handsPick-up at Frascati station at half past four, a tasting of three Frascati wines with local snacks at the farmhouse vineyard, then a guided walk through the historic centre and …
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With your handsA guided walk through the estate on the volcanic slopes above Frascati, with the story of how vines have been grown here, ending in a tasting of the estate's own wines paired wi…
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On two wheelsA guided e-bike ride leaving the centre of Frascati, climbing gently towards Monte Tuscolo and continuing on dirt tracks and hill roads to one of the area's historic wineries, w…
See the dayBeech woods turning, chestnut country and the volcanic hills. The walking months here are the ones either side of summer, not summer.
Closest to Rome first. Never by who pays us.
On the trailA Greek-rite abbey founded in 1004 by monks from southern Italy led by St Nilus of Rossano, the last of the Byzantine monasteries that were once spread across southern Italy and…
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On the trailVisitors wear headsets for a mixed-reality tour through the piano nobile and the Pannini Gallery of Villa Grazioli, one of the Tuscolan villas.
See the day
On the trailA WWF-run reserve of meadows and Mediterranean woodland near Fregene, in the Fiumicino municipality.
See the day
On the trailA wetland managed by WWF near Maccarese, used as a stopover and wintering ground by many bird species: ducks in winter, herons, kingfisher, marsh harrier, and osprey in autumn.
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On the trailClip into a harness and cross the trees: from age four there is a course to do.
€5 per person
Books on ViviAvventura
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On the trailThe archaeological area of the Latin city of Tusculum, on the ridge above Frascati.
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On the trailVilla Mondragone sits on the Tuscolan hills between Frascati and Monte Porzio Catone.
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On the trailThe gardens of the Ville Pontificie at Castel Gandolfo are open as the Borgo Laudato Si', a working site of integral ecology.
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On the trailThe Apostolic Palace at Castel Gandolfo was opened to the public in 2014.
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On the trailA ten-kilometre easy walk from Castel Gandolfo to Nemi between the two crater lakes, through woods and past the villages on their rims.
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On the trailDay one walks from Castel Gandolfo to Nemi between the two lakes, with a brunch stop at a farm bistrot and a floating aperitivo on the lake at the end; the night is spent in ten…
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On the trailA guided walk through Frascati that begins in the Scuderie Aldobrandini — the Aldobrandini stables converted by the architect Massimiliano Fuksas into the Museo Tuscolano — then…
See the dayDriving time from the middle of Rome, on the road network and without traffic. It tells you whether the day stands up; it is not a timetable.
Getting there
The day stays yours: you leave when you want, stop where you want, and come back when the light goes.
Affiliate link — you pay their price, never more, and they pay us. You book with Localrent, and anything about that booking goes through them.
See prices on LocalrentNo parking to find, no wrong turns, and you leave when the day is done.
Affiliate link — you pay their price, never more, and they pay us. You book with Welcome Pickups, and anything about that booking goes through them.
See prices on Welcome PickupsGenerally from late summer into September, earlier for whites, later up in the hills — and different every year, because it follows the weather. The estates announce it when they know; the phone number on each card is the way to catch it.
Later, in the autumn, and again it moves. The Sabina harvest is the one closest to Rome and the easiest to join for a day.
For everything outside the city, it is the best time. Comfortable temperatures, working countryside, long lunches, and hill towns that belong to the people who live in them again.
Some. Autumn here is mostly clear with occasional heavy days, and the caves, cellars, mills and thermal pools do not care either way — there is a guide for wet days on this site.
Yes. Several estates in the Castelli, the Sabina and the Tuscia open the vendemmia to visitors and sell it as a day where you pick and then eat. The dates move each year with the weather, so the phone number on the card is the way to catch it.
Grapes from the end of August into early October, chestnuts through October, olives from late October into December. Truffles overlap with the olives and run on into the winter. All of them move with the year rather than the calendar.
Foraging days for wild greens in the Alban hills, herb picking and salt workshops, walking with donkeys through the chestnut woods, mill tours, and the walking, which is at its best in October when the beech turns. All three grids above are that season.
The olive harvest particularly: it is a day outdoors with nets, ladders and a fire at the end, and picking is a job a child can genuinely do. The grape harvest is warmer and stickier and works better with older ones. Minimum ages, where set, are on the card.
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