I’m not a believer in fate or that things happening for a reason.
Outside scientifically logical and explainable happenings, I think most things occur randomly with zero divine intervention.
It’s just that, at the risk of pissing off believers, it sounds weird to me that there’s some unseen controlling power directing stuff.
However, sometimes my devotion to non-belief is shaken, like it more than 10 years ago when Luca Santovito came into my life.
Luca leaving the Guardiani-Farchione winery with a jug of Abruzzzese inspiration.
At the time, we were getting our original Amazing Abruzzo Tours location – Villa d’Abruzzo – ready for our first guests’ arrival on May 1, 2016. It was a tense time. Construction and decorations weren’t complete. The purchase of a tour van was dragging on in sea of bureaucracy, and underneath it all was the fear that we could fall flat on our faces business-wise.
Hoping to attract attention, I’d negotiated a deal with the Ottawa Citizen newspaper to write a series of 12 articles on my wife Lisa Grassi-Blais and I quitting our jobs in Canada, moving to Italy, renovating a broken-down villa, and opening a small-group tour company. The first articles were published in February 2016.
Those articles prompted a wave of reservations that were the key to us surviving the early years of our business. They changed my life that way – but in another, more important, way too.
A woman from Ottawa with family roots in the Abruzzese village of Rapino read one of the articles, and, like magic, a series of chemicals and neurotransmitters bopped around her grey matter and then spit this out:
“My friend Luca lives in Rapino, and he wants to be a tour guide in Abruzzo. He should contact this Jake guy.”
She sent him and email telling him to contact me.
His email arrived on February 20, 2016.
“Good morning. My name is Luca Santovito, I'm 27 years old and I live in Rapino, a small town near Chieti.”
Originally, I was planning to do the bulk of the driving and guiding, but we had enough bookings at that point to know we needed a second person for that aspect of the business. We asked to meet Luca, but he couldn’t make it until March 8. We said OK, and in the intervening time, our bookings took off as the series of articles became more popular and they were published in other cities.
So, on March 8 when we met Luca at our Villa, we were ready to hire him as long as his English was passable and he had two arms and two legs. To our relief, he had both those requirements and a good grasp of the kind of tours we were going to do.
More than that though, his earnestness, honestness, and empathetic nature were blindingly obvious.
One year after starting with us, Luca brought on his brother Giuseppe as a second guide. More on Giuseppe coming soon.
You can fake all kinds of things, but not those. This was a good guy. We offered him a full-time job before the end of the meeting and said we needed to know soon. He played it cool and said he’d get back to us.
“He’s perfect,” Lisa Grassi-Blais said as we watched him walk to his car.
I went outside and spied on him. He closed the car door, let out a big whoop of joy, and pounded the steering wheel before making an excited phone call and driving away. The next day, he took the job, and he has been a constant in my life since.
It was a joy to work alongside Luca as we figured out how to run the business as a team. He is tireless and so accommodating that from day one, guests told me he’s the best guide they’ve ever had. He’s never once complained about any aspect of the job. He’s raised concerns - all of them legit - but never complained. He takes initiative he makes rational decisions.
As we expanded over the years, Luca became our head guide, and he now runs a team of six guides with five vans. Each week, he takes the tour choices of up to 30 people and delivers a workable a plan. He has developed more than 30 tours and put together three separate week-long tours that keep people returning.
On Saturdays, he coordinates dozens of drop-offs and pick-ups all over. More than 330 Saturdays with a total of more than 4000 guests in 10 years and we’ve never missed a person and only missed one flight when a car crash happened right in front of Luca’s van.
Each week, guests tell me our guides are the best they’ve ever had – and that’s all Luca. He hires great people, trains them well, leads by example, and supports his team. If there is a screw up and somebody needs to go to Rome twice on a Saturday, Luca does it. If somebody needs to work on their day off, Luca doesn’t ask one of his guides to do it, he does it.
He is a great colleague, but even a better friend.
He’s been there to support me when things are a little tense. During covid, we spent countless hours banging out our anxiety mashing our guitars in our ad-hoc punk rock band. We’ve come to know his family well. Lisa and I attended his wedding where I played a song during the ceremony.
And he’s come to Canada with us - and even visited with that very friend who read the article and brought us together.
He really is like another brother.
And when I think of the number of things that had to go right for Luca and me to have met, it’s hard not to think some sort of divine intervention was at work. Like could the amazing bond I feel with Luca really be the result of a bunch of random shit happening?
The answer is mostly likely yes, but I don’t know – and I don’t have to know.
All I know is this:
Luca is a gem of a human being. I’m super lucky to count him as a colleague and honoured to be able to call him a part of my family.