Insider’s Italy
Meet the family
My parents’ wedding day, December 1959, Rome’s CampidoglioHOW IT ALL BEGAN
Insider’s Italy began in 1919 when my grandparents sailed to Italy from New York, excited to take up the post of Commercial Attaché at the American Embassy in Rome.
No sooner did they arrive, they began to travel. In short order, they also started a family and before many years had passed were travelling with three children who refused to speak English; only Italian. The eldest child was my mother Isabel, who in 1959 was married on Rome’s Campidoglio to Howard Shaw, a Rome-based novelist whose splendid The Crime of Giovanni Venturi transpires in Trastevere.
I also was born in Rome, and grew up here. From babyhood, I explored Italy with parents who had tireless curiosity and endless appreciation for every part of the country.
Passion for Italian travels
Their enthusiasm shaped my interest in sharing my passion for Italian travels. After Bryn Mawr College, I returned to Rome, founded Marjorie’s Gastronomic Walking Tours of Italy and soon after transformed that business into Insider’s Italy. The company grew in New York and then later in London; however, after my husband Robert Stark I were married, we were determined to live full-time in Italy.
Without my husband Robert Stark, a violist, photographer and lawyer, Insider’s Italy would lack a principal player and I my Italian travel companion. For 22 years we together have explored, documented, photographed, and delighted in Italian regions from south to north.
Our children are 21-year-old Nathan Louis and 19-year-old Isabel. Isabel is the third generation in our family of Rome-born women.
Marjorie, Cape Orso
my grandfather at the Palatine, 1920
my mother with her grandmother at the Colosseum in Rome, 1922
my mother and my grandmother at the Forum in Rome, 1924
my mother and her siblings with my grandfather in Venice, 1929
my mother and siblings at the Colosseum in Rome, 1930
with my father in Florence 
in Venice Capo d'Orso
my husband Robert Stark 
with my children at the Museum of Tarquinia
with my daughter in the Pazzi ChapelAndrew Marks