Affiliate disclosure
The short version: some links here earn us a commission, you pay the same either way, and nobody pays to be featured.
Which links are affiliate links
Every "Check Price & Availability" button, and every in-text link that opens a class listing, points to GetYourGuide or Viator and carries our partner tag. If you book after clicking one, the platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns from the operator. Your price is identical to the price you would see going straight to that listing, because our cut comes out of the platform's margin and is never added to your ticket.
Those two platforms are the only affiliate relationships on this site. There are no hotel links, no display advertising, no sponsored posts and no paid reviews. The class videos embedded on the homepage earn us nothing at all, and neither does the market map beside them. If a third network is ever added, this page and the footer disclosure will name it before the first link goes live, not after.
What it does not change
- Inclusion. Every class that clears the tests is here: hands-on and pasta-first, running in Florence or as a day out of it, genuinely bookable right now by an individual with published dates, and carrying figures that survived two independent verification passes. Ten listings cleared all four, run by ten different operators, so no company appears twice selling the same afternoon under two names.
- Ordering. No operator can buy a position and none has been offered one. Where a section leads with one class, that class is the most-reviewed in its section, a rule you can check yourself against the numbers on the cards.
- What we say about them. The family class carries 23 reviews, a thin sample from a newer listing, and the card says 23 rather than burying it. The most expensive class here, at $117, does not buy more food than the $35 one: it buys a kitchen kept entirely gluten-free, and the page says so. And because all ten of these classes sit at 4.9 or 5.0, the pages state plainly that the ratings do not separate them, which is a less persuasive line than pretending one is the highest rated in Florence.
- What we leave out. Listings whose figures could not be confirmed on two independent passes are held back, and they would pay commission exactly like the ones we kept. Cookery schools that sell only through their own calendars, multi-day courses and email-arranged private chefs are a different product and sit outside what this site compares, whatever they might be worth to us.
- Things we earn nothing from. Mercato Centrale's upstairs food hall, open every day from 9am to 11pm, the ground-floor market below it, the Sant'Ambrogio stalls that have traded since 1873, and a bag of fresh pasta carried back to a rented kitchen all pay us precisely zero. They still get their say in the guides wherever they beat a paid ticket.
Ratings, review counts and prices
Every rating and review count on this site is the platform's own published number, read off the live listing and then checked a second time on an independent pass before it was printed. Nothing is averaged across platforms, rounded up or invented, and where the two checks disagreed the figure was left off the page rather than smoothed over. The ten classes carry 29,977 traveller reviews between them, and that total is the sum of the real per-listing counts.
Prices work the same way and come with a bigger caveat. What you see is a current from-price, the cheapest per-person option on that class at the time it was read, running $35 to $117 across the lineup. What you actually pay moves with the date, the session, the option you pick and the country you book from, so the live listing is always the authority. A price that reads differently in two places usually means the platform is showing you a localised currency, not that the class put its fee up.
If you would rather not use our links
Search the operator's name on GetYourGuide or Viator directly, or find the operator's own website and book there. Cucina con Nuti, Dalle Nostre Mani, Towns of Italy, Florence Untold and the rest all sell these classes themselves. We would genuinely rather you got your hands in the flour. The comparisons, the price table, the FAQ and the guides work exactly as well as research whether or not you ever click a booking link.
Questions about any of this: email us. How the listings are checked in the first place is on the about page.