Lindsay Marie Morris

Working in tourism was never on Amy Chambers' roadmap. As a student at San Diego State University, she immersed herself in cell and molecular biology, not language or culture.

But a study abroad trip to Florence in her twenties changed everything. What began as a detour became a lifelong passion, leading Amy to spend months at a time in Italy over the past two decades. Along the way, she cultivated deep friendships and a nuanced understanding of the country and its culture.

That love of la dolce vita inspired her to cofound the Scappare Travel Club (from the Italian word for "escape") with fellow Italy enthusiast Maria Goldman, whom she met while studying Italian more than a decade ago. The LLC officially launched in January 2024.

Although she still maintains her career as a nurse practitioner in urgent care, internal medicine, and pediatric psychiatry (negotiating time off for extended stays in Italy), Amy pours equal energy into her business. By design, the company offers intimate, small-group tours that eschew conventional tour operators in favor of a trusted network of local friends, opening doors to sights, foods, and experiences that most travelers never encounter.

Amy discussed the origins of Scappare, the philosophy behind its boutique approach, and why sharing Italy with others has become such a personal calling.

Where did the idea for the Scappare Travel Club come from?

The idea for it started a long time before we formed the actual company. I went to study in my twenties and lived in Florence for a while.

It took a little while for me, but after I assimilated, I felt a sense of home there, not in the same way I feel at home here, but with a sense of belonging. And it opened something in my heart.

I felt a different way there. I developed a deep-standing love for the Italian way of life, and when I left, I felt the need to return. So, I did the next year and kept going back year after year.

I also wanted to learn more about the culture and the language. So, I spent the next 10 years studying Italian and learning Italian. And once I learned the language, I went back even more because, for me, learning the language is like the key that unlocks the door to a whole different culture, way of doing things, and way of looking at things: eating, relating to people, conversing—all of it.

Italy is now a meaningful part of my life, one that I hold dear and cultivate. Starting the Scappare Travel Club came from that. It came from my love affair with Italy. It's nice for me to see that love affair develop in other people, too.

 

Scappare Travel Club Co-founders Maria Goldman and Amy Chambers enjoy an aperitivo in Pienza, Italy.

How did the business idea become a reality?

I met Maria 12 years ago while studying Italian at the Italian Cultural Center here in San Diego. She was learning Italian at the same pace that I was.

As a nurse practitioner by day, I have been able to spend two to three months a year in Italy, so I've been able to realize my dream of sharing the magic of Italy with other travelers. And people began to want to experience what that was like.

So, Maria and I got together and thought, "What if we could do this formally? Maybe even people who don't think they want to go to Italy could experience its magic—but in a way that's different from typical tourism."

My dear friend Andrea drives us around Tuscany, and our friend Massimo is a nationally licensed tour guide in Sicily from Ragusa. We love to share backdoor experiences with small groups. You eat at restaurants that tour companies don't send you to. You meet our friends, you become friends, too.  

 

Amy with Local Friends in Montepulciano, Italy

 

Share the significance of the name Scappare.

It means "to escape" in Italian, and I wanted to name the company after this concept. I wanted the name to be a hybrid of Italian and English, like me.

I'm from California, but I wanted to include Italian words, and I actually received a lot of pushback about that. I heard, "If you name your company with an Italian word, no one's going to know what you are. No one will know what it means. They won't know how to look you up. It's going to be confusing."

I felt that people would be able to relate to the feeling of getting on a plane and escaping their everyday routine. That feeling of escaping and flying away is the best. For me, knowing Italy is on the other end of that destination is a very important and meaningful feeling. Escaping to Italy is my love in life. 

Not that your life here is not important, but escaping to Italy is just the best thing ever. It's the best place on earth, according to me!

So, I wanted to have that feeling front and center in the name of my company.  There's some fun in explaining it to fellow travelers. And when I do, people can relate even though it's not in English.

 

Amy with her friend Paolo, who leads Florence walking tours for Scappare Travel Club.
 

What does that concept look like in practice?

Our signature trip is the Florence and Tuscany trip, and our Italian friends arrange the ground transportation. We have Paolo, a friend of mine whom I met years ago, who does walking tours of Florence.

Many people organize tours, and they take larger groups than we do. We want to maintain the boutique, small-group experience.

With us, you're traveling with friends. Maria and I (at least one of us) are always there on the trips. We're not necessarily doing all of the activities, but we are there in the background or in the foreground, so that our guests have a familiar face close by.

We like to get to know our guests; we don't just put together a tour and say, "Okay, go have fun." We are there with them.

Many tour companies work with destination management companies in Italy and create packaged tours that they pay for. While we do work with destination management companies (sometimes for the bare bones of the tours), we don't package everything with them. We actually pay extra to use our own people that we know and trust.

Maria and I go on research trips and meet people. We vet every single hotel. We meet tour guides ourselves.

We want people to see the authentic Italy. Not a restaurant that's front and center in the Piazza, where you'll be overcharged or there's a tourist menu, but the restaurant five blocks away, where you might have to walk, but Massimo's friend owns it.

 

Scappare Travel Club guest Glenn shares pasta he made in class as part of a farm tour in Tuscany. 

What advice would you offer to someone who wants to pursue a similar path?

Be prepared to take out the trash and do all of the things. It's not just about your vision.

I love Italy and I love to talk about it, but when you're starting a business, there's a lot of nitty-gritty work on the backend, and things I've had to learn how to do on the business side that are new to me. But I'm willing to do it.

I started this company because of my love for Italy. I love the feeling I get when I go there. I love the culture. I love its history. I enjoy discussing it with people. Italy has done so much for me personally in my life.

I started the company to promote that feeling, that affinity. I want to share that. 

People start companies for all kinds of reasons: for profit, necessity, or as a hobby. Mine was for the genuine love of Italian culture and people. So, keeping my day job and starting slow was the way to go for that. Eventually, I'd like the company to grow so that more people can experience the magical feeling I have felt.

Scappare Travel Club guests Carol, Carol, and Pamela in Calabria, Italy  

What do you ultimately hope to share?

When we travel, we expose ourselves to things outside of our own bubble. And when we expose ourselves to different things that, at first, are uncomfortable, like the discomfort of being in a different place with a different language, it breeds tolerance. The less exposed we are, the less tolerant we become.

 

Italy is an incredibly special place. I've traveled to lots of places in the world, but, in my opinion, there is no place like Italy. There is no place like the culture and the people, the language, the way of life; it speaks to me.

I want to show people the magic that it is. And I know not everybody will be as passionate as I am, and people have different affinities towards different places, but Italy is amazing! It's magical. It draws you in. It'll make you want to go back.

I want people to see and experience that.

 

Amy at Mercato Centrale in Florence  

 

 

 

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For more than 20 years, Melissa Sepulveda enjoyed a photography career. She took family portraits and provided shots for the advertising department of a high-end handbag company. But everything changed on Mother’s Day weekend of 2019 when she learned she had breast cancer.
 

She chose not to share this news with her mother, who was not feeling well, even after scheduling an August mastectomy. As it turned out, her mother was hospitalized in July, a stay that lasted until September. Melissa had her operation on a separate floor in the same hospital wing, but still, she kept her diagnosis from her mother. She knew it would make things more difficult.
 

After she was discharged from the hospital, Melissa spent two weeks recovering before returning to her mother’s bedside, where she spent her mother’s final days on the pull-out chair until her mother passed on September 16. She was devastated, exhausted from her own recovery, and struggling to make sense of what life looked like without her mother. Her father was already gone. 
 

Melissa turned 50 that December and decided that after such a harrowing spring, summer, and fall, she needed to celebrate. She held a holiday open house without telling anyone it was her birthday—just an opportunity to have fun, relax, laugh, and sing together. 

One of her friends gave her a book called Baking Bread for Beginners. The two had fantasized about opening a cafe.

Melissa didn’t open the book until January, when she made her first loaf of bread. As she kneaded the dough, she was struck by its texture, which, funnily, reminded her of her mother and grandmother.
 

 

Working with dough reminds Melissa of her mother and grandmother.

“My mother and grandmother both had very soft upper arms, and as kids, my cousins, siblings, and I loved holding on to those arms,” Melissa remembers. “We would call them dough arms, which is what that dough felt like.”

Kneading it was therapeutic, as was the smell of the yeast, which brought her back to her Sicilian grandmother’s kitchen. From then on, she couldn’t stop baking.

Today, as the owner of Forno Bakery in Wareham, Massachusetts, on the southern outskirts of Greater Boston, Melissa bakes and sells breads, cannoli, quiches, focaccia, fonuts (a hybrid of a donut and focaccia), and more. 

We discussed her influences and how she took her baking from personal therapy to a community-oriented business. She shared her challenges, goals, and what she hopes to deliver.

Forno Bakery loaves

How did your grandmother influence your passion for baking?
I consider myself a generationally taught baker, because it's nothing that you can learn in school, or you can learn from a book. It's really your hands-on experience. It was with my grandmother as soon as I could hold some dough. Without knowing it, I was experiencing what that texture felt like, and I liked to feel that. 

I remember distinctly loving the smell of yeast at a very early age. Some people are kind of offended by it, but those two things really resonate with me. 

When I bake now, it's different. It's a feel. It isn't just in my hands. It's almost meditative. It's extremely therapeutic and comforting because I'm returning to my grandmother and mother, who made things differently. 

My grandmother loved to take the time, and she could embroider. She was very, very talented and very creative. When she passed away, we found all these little scraps of paper with different ingredients written on them randomly around her kitchen. They were notes for herself about something she was working on or something she had added as she was baking or making whatever it was. We just realized at that point just how smart she was with very limited resources. 

You have to think about how she arrived on Ellis Island with her little sister in the early 1900s. She was nine years old, one of many children, and a lot of them were still back in Italy. When they came over, she actually had conjunctivitis, so she was separated from her mother when they landed. 

My mom and I went to New York and visited Ellis Island, and just to imagine that my grandmother walked through there… It wasn't just a setup of chairs and suitcases off to the side. She couldn't speak English and was being separated from her mother in a different country. 

She was a child and did not know what was happening. I can't imagine the fear or the anxiety that she must have felt during that time. The next day, she was reunited with her mother, but the idea of that made me so emotional as I stood in that building.

Eventually, all the other family members slowly came over, and everyone was here in Massachusetts. They started in Mansfield, Massachusetts, and then ended up in Quincy, Massachusetts. 

Melissa's grandmother's home in Sicily

My grandmother met my grandfather and married when she was 16. She made her wedding dress, which is just so beautiful. Her sister used to create a Maypole like the one they use for the May Day celebration. She would make paper dresses for all of the girls. You would not even know that they were paper—the craftsmanship, the detail, and all that were so relevant.

I grew up with her. She and her sister were very close, and her sister married my grandmother's husband's brother. So we were so interconnected with this huge family. 

I'd watch my aunt crochet, and my grandmother embroider, bake, make things, and just go about her day. They were always busy doing something productive and very clean. 

My mother liked to do everything very quickly. She did not enjoy the process, whereas I enjoyed it. I really have that connection, and my mother always wanted to make it as fast and efficient as possible.

As a teenager, I remember wanting to make and decorate some cookies. I think William Sonoma had just come out, and they had these giant Christmas cookie cutters. So I got the cutters and told my mother I was going to put one at every place for Christmas dinner. I said, “I need 20, so we're going to decorate these. This is what you do.”

My mother’s cookies ended up looking like something a 3-year-old would do, because again, she just did not have the patience. And I was so into the actual craftsmanship, making, and experience.  

Forno Bakery cannoli

What did you bake with your grandmother?
My grandmother made homemade cannoli. She made the shells. Obviously, I wasn't allowed to fry the shells or anything like that, but we would make that.

We made polenta on the first snow. She'd get out a huge board that sat on the kitchen table, and then she would spread the polenta all over the board. The sauce would go on top of that, and the meatballs and sausage would go on top of the sauce. I would help her stir and spread it out on the board. 

When we made biscotti, I’d help her roll out the dough. That wasn't too often because she was up very early, but she did live around the corner from my house, so I could visit as often as I wanted. 

When she would make things, it wasn't even like she sat me down to say, “OK, now this is how you do this.” It would be mostly from observation and her understanding of taste and smell. She’d say, “Can you smell the salt in the water? That's how you know to put enough.”

You would just see the amounts of the ingredients that went in. I don't even remember anyone teaching me how to make our family's tomato sauce, but I just did it over the years. 

I made bread one time, and she had come over. I was living at home with my parents, and she came over to the house, and I said, “Ma (we called her Ma), I made bread.” 

She kind of looked at it with a discerning eye, which was odd for her. She was very gentle and very kind. She wasn't your stereotypical Italian grandmother with a rolling pin in their hands and yelling or swearing. She wasn't like that at all. I asked, “Do you want to taste it?” and she said, “OK.”

She took a little piece, and the bread had been sitting on the kitchen table under the fan. As it was cooling, it made the house smell good. But I didn't realize that the fan was blowing on it, making the crust nice and crispy. 

She was out of her mind with excitement and joy. As soon as she bit into it and it crunched in her teeth, she looked at me and said, “This is delicious!”

She took some home, and that had to be the biggest compliment from my grandmother.

 

Melissa's boule loaves are Forno Bakery's best sellers.

What inspired you to launch Forno Bakery?

One day, I made 14 loaves out of my little kitchen oven, and my husband was like, “What do we do with these? I love bread, but this is getting a little silly.” And I said, “I'll just post on Facebook, ‘Whoever needs bread—I made extra, come and get it.’”

They did. Then I did it again, and they came and got the bread again. My friends were saying to me, "You can't do this. You can't just give away the bread. You need to sell the bread." And I said, "I'm not a baker." And they said, "We think you are a baker." 

I ended up charging like $5 for a loaf. I didn't do any numbers or anything like that, but it started to catch on really quickly because then COVID came, and people were coming to my door, buying bread, and just finding that sense of community. We were all reaching out to each other. 

My local town market, a general store, wanted to carry my bread, so I sold it to them. It just really caught on like wildfire. But I was just working out of my little oven in my kitchen, finding myself working from five o'clock in the morning until about seven o'clock at night, passing out in bed, and getting up and doing it again. 

I was like, “I can't keep doing this. This is silly.” So, I had to make a decision. I would either go forward or stop because I was at a crossroads. 

One dog walk changed everything.

We got a COVID dog for my son when he wanted a puppy, and one day, I was walking the dog. The town I live in is very Norman Rockwell, unlike anywhere I've ever experienced. Everyone says “Hi” to everybody. Everybody's going to take care of you. And that's just kind of how we roll. 

So I was walking the dog, and I met up with a neighbor, who said, “My wife used to go around the world teaching people how to set up bakeries.” And I said, “Oh, wow. Well, isn't that a coincidence? That's amazing.”

He said, “She's got this commercial oven she wants to give you. It's just hanging out in her warehouse.” I said, “I don't have a location. It's just in my house, and I’m trying to decide which way to go.” 

I just felt like everything in the universe was pointing me toward continuing, and that my mother and my grandmother were part of this. Like, “You need an oven? We'll find one for you.” Your neighbor, two doors down, whom you didn't meet until you got the dog. They have a commercial oven. 

When he said this, I kind of laughed it off and thought, “Nice guy; that’s sweet.” I didn’t do anything about it. 

A few months passed, and he said again, “Amy really wants to give you that oven.” I was like, “OK. I’m going to go and find someplace to put this oven.”

Fast-forward: One of my closest friends did not like her executive job, didn't know what she was going to do, and said, “I want to come on board and help you open up a brick-and-mortar. I'll do whatever you want.” So, we found a spot in the next town over, and that was almost four years ago, last December. 

She quickly realized that baking was not her passion and helped me get off my feet for the first six months to a year, after which I was on my own. 

Owning a business is not an easy feat, but every time I encounter something that would deter me, something else counteracts it. Like the gift of the oven, which tells me, “Keep going.” So, I continue, and I kind of laugh to myself because I'm selling all of the things that my grandmother taught me or made, and we all still make in my family.

The cannoli cream is very specialized for what we do. There are the anise pillows and biscotti, raspberry bars, lemon squares—all those things. I never realized what a gem they were, how special they were, and that other people weren't growing up having those as good or so consistently. 

 

Shelves full of Forno Bakery goodies

 

What are your goals?
For so long on this journey, I was just riding the wave. And now that it's established and people know me, people recognize me outside of my town from different silly videos on social media, or they know the name of the bakery. I am floored. It made me kind of rethink, “Am I going to continue this?”

I would love to continue expanding, have management and departments, and have my own free-standing building where I could have a section with classes and a little section for retail. So, ultimately, that's what I would like: to have my own spot.

Quality ingredients and small-batch, hand production: Forno Bakery

 
What do you hope to share?

I'm not a huge baking company where things have to be commercialized and really huge baked. Everything is still small batches and very nice, good-quality ingredients, and everything comes from what I know. I get so much joy from giving somebody something I made and seeing them so thrilled and happy about it. That is returning a feeling of joy to me, and I think without that, I would be very, very lost because that's where I got my joy. 

Don't get me wrong; I love my children, but the core of my joy was the security I had from my parents. I remind myself that my mother had to go through losing her mother, and her mother had to go through losing her mother. They taught me along the way how to deal with this. 

The inside is different from what you see outside, so I always try to fix that inside piece by selling our goodies. 

 

 

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