The Sourdough School Annual Tuscan Retreat is Available to Book.
A COURSE ROOTED IN PLACE AND HERITAGE
Heritage runs through this course. I am Italian by blood and was brought up in France, and at Castello di Potentino the combination finally works together — everything that has shaped how I think about bread, food, and place finds its rhythm here.
The castle sits near Seggiano, deep in Tuscany, around forty-five minutes from Siena. It is off the beaten track, in a part of the country that tourism has barely touched. The area is rural in a way that feels almost untouched, and that is part of the joy. You arrive at a three-thousand-year-old castle, and it is almost like stepping into a different world.
The castle is the owner’s home. There is no interior designer here. Art, books, literature, the kind of rooms and corners you could only find in a real working castle. Tractors, an olive grove, vineyards, and locals wandering in and out with whatever is growing that week. It is extraordinary.
I love this course. This is where bread is lived every day. I love it because bread stops being fragmented. It is not baking over here, nutrition over there, genetics somewhere else, and life squeezed in between. In Tuscany, bread returns to its rightful place as a daily, embodied act — made with hands, eaten slowly, shared.
There is no rush, no pressure, no compressing decades of work into soundbites. We talk, bake, walk, eat, and think in the same rhythm. Students meet me as I actually work — quietly rigorous, deeply human — and that is rare. I catch the last of the summer sun. Heat, time, stone, grain, fermentation, rest. These are not concepts there; they just are. I love this because it reminds me of why I began. The love of bread and all it can be.
YOU ARE INVITED TO JOIN BAKING AS A WAY OF LIFE
So this is not your “normal bread course”. It is a week you step into. Mornings begin with hands in dough, afternoons soften into amazing conversations, walking, rest, and shared tables. Bread moves out of the theoretical and back into daily life — where it belongs. I think that people leave feeling changed, not because they learned more, but because they lived it.
JOIN A RARE INTELLECTUAL AND HUMAN COMMUNITY
The people who come are thoughtful, curious, and quietly serious about health, craft, and care. Bakers sit alongside clinicians, artists alongside scientists. Conversations unfold slowly and honestly. Many students describe this week as the moment they finally felt at home in their thinking — bread, health, and meaning belong together.
A 3000 YEAR OLD CASTLE IS THE PLACE THAT HOLDS YOU WHILE YOU LEARN
Castello di Potentino is not a venue. It is a living landscape — stone, heat, vines, olives, grain, time. Learning happens because the environment allows it. You slow down. You notice. You remember why bread has always mattered. This is the kind of learning that shapes future practice, future teaching, and future students.
THIS IS A THREE MONTH COURSE WITH A ONE WEEK PRACTICAL
People sometimes forget that the week in the castle is only the practical. Around it sits three months of support from me — online sessions, the recipes, the depth of teaching that sits behind every recipe, and the practice of weaving bread, lifestyle medicine, and your own daily rhythms together at home. You leave Tuscany and the work continues. I am on hand for three months afterwards while you keep baking, keep practising, and keep building this into your life.
Places are open to book now. See you there.
Vanessa
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An Invitation to Proven: Film Premiere
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