About Ana's Secret Guide to Italy
An independent editorial platform covering Florence and Tuscany — where traveller insights from a community of 95,000 meet years of on-the-ground research to create guides that truly reflect how people experience Italy today.
About Ana
I fell in love with Florence in 2006. A pistachio gelato from Grom, eaten in front of the Duomo as the afternoon light caught the marble. Brunelleschi's dome seen from the top of 463 steps. Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce, glowing with colours painted in 1320. Italy did not just charm me — it changed the way I saw the world.
I was working in finance at the time. Florence kept pulling me back.
Eventually I stopped resisting. I left my career, built AppyGuide — audio guides narrated by some of Florence's finest art historians — and began what has become years of deep immersion in this city and its culture. Along the way I met brilliant, generous people: art historians, master artisans keeping Renaissance techniques alive in small workshops, sculptors, winemakers, scholars who decode hidden messages in frescoes over morning espresso. They showed me a Florence that most visitors never find.
That is what this platform is built on.
Ana's Secret Guide to Italy is an independent travel media platform dedicated to Florence and Tuscany — combining editorial guides, curated experiences, audio content and a community of 95,000 travellers who share a genuine passion for this part of the world. The guides are written to the standard of quality travel journalism: researched in depth, honest in opinion, and designed to help people experience Italy the way it deserves to be experienced.
We are not a tour operator or an aggregator. We are a media company — and we take that seriously.
For partnership and collaboration enquiries, please get in touch. We work with hotels, experience providers, brands and cultural institutions whose values align with ours — quality, authenticity and a genuine respect for Florence and its traditions.