If you’ve ever poked around behind the scenes of this website (following a link, spotting a mention in the footer, or reading the “About Us” page before booking anything), you may have stumbled across something unexpected: Baja California Travel, a tour operator running self-drive and guided trips through the deserts and coastlines of Baja California Sur, Mexico. And it’s closely tied to Italy Trails.
You’ve probably wondered: hang on, what does a company that designs self-drive trips in Italy have to do with whale watching in Baja California Sur?
Fair question. Let us explain, and the answer starts more than 6,000 miles (10,000 km) from here.
It All Started in Mexico
Let’s clear something up right away, because people often assume the opposite: Baja California Travel is not Italy Trails’ “Mexican project.” It’s exactly the other way around. Baja California Travel came first, in Mexico, in 2016, founded by Adriano Ceccarelli. Italy Trails came later, as its sister company. To understand why the two companies are connected, you have to start with him.
Adriano is from Rome, and for years he worked for American multinationals. But whenever he could, he took off: Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, by motorbike and off-road. Then one day he discovered Baja California and never stopped thinking about it, until in 2014 he left Rome and moved to La Paz. Since then he has driven the length and breadth of the peninsula, and today he knows it like few people do: the roads, the villages, the hidden bays, the right time of year for everything.
Out of that deep knowledge, Baja California Travel was born in 2016. From cold security systems to selling dreams: a quick switch, and one that comes with a huge responsibility, which is not to let those dreams down. Today, ten years on, it’s a solid business based in La Paz, with clients who often, after just a few hours together, become friends.
So Where Does Italy Trails Come In?
This is where Italy enters the picture. Someone who has spent a lifetime exploring the world by motorbike and off-road, and then built a company around independent travel, sooner or later turns around and looks at his own country with the same eyes. And Italy, seen from that angle, is one giant playground: mountain passes, coastal roads, hill towns where time seems to have stood still.
That’s how Italy Trails was born: the Italian sister of Baja California Travel. Same philosophy, same way of working, designed for English-speaking travelers (the US, the UK, Australia) who dream of driving in Italy but don’t know where to start: where to sleep, which roads to avoid, how not to get lost among the restricted traffic zones (the infamous ZTL). In short, we took what Adriano learned in Baja and brought it back home.
And as we built Italy Trails, the parallels kept showing up in the small details, not just in the big idea. In Italy we point people toward places that never make it onto a postcard: a barbershop in a small town with a strange Al Capone connection, a mural nobody talks about tucked away on a pier in Naples. In Baja, that same instinct shows up as sending travelers to the old Jesuit mission towns along the spine of the peninsula, or to a quiet, almost empty beach like Playa Balandra that most Cabo-bound tourists have never even heard of. Different continent, same reflex: look past the obvious highlight and go find what makes a place feel like itself.
What Really Connects Them
It’s not just about who owns what. Nobody wants to read a blog post about a company’s org chart. What really ties Italy Trails and Baja California Travel together is a shared stubbornness about a few very specific things:
Self-drive, not spectator travel. Both are built on the idea that you should be in control of your own trip. Whether it’s a motorbike winding through the mountain passes of Abruzzo or a 4×4 heading down a dirt track toward a hidden bay outside Todos Santos, the point is always the same: you’re the one driving, not watching the scenery slide past a bus window.
Real routes, tested by people who actually drive them. We don’t build itineraries from a map and a hunch. Behind them is someone who has traveled the world on two wheels and four, and who knows exactly the difference between “this road looks fine on Google Maps” and “this road is actually drivable at sunset in a rental car.”
Off the beaten path, but not off the grid. Neither company wants to send you somewhere remote just for the sake of being remote. We want to take you somewhere beautiful and a little less trampled (Colobraro instead of the usual Amalfi Coast highlight reel, Espíritu Santo instead of yet another beach club in Cabo) but with enough planning behind it that you’re never actually stranded.
Small team, direct relationship. Neither Italy Trails nor Baja California Travel is a giant, faceless booking platform. If you email us a question about a route, a real person who has probably driven it themselves will answer. That’s true whether you’re asking where to park in Positano or when’s the best time to see gray whales in Magdalena Bay.
What This Means for You
Honestly? If you’re reading the Italy Trails blog, not much changes: you’re here to plan a road trip or a motorcycle tour in Italy, and that’s what we do best.
But if you’re the kind of traveler who makes it this far into an article about how two companies came to be (respect, truly), there’s a good chance you could fall for Baja California Sur the same way Adriano did. If the phrase “self-drive trip through spectacular, uncrowded landscapes, with real local knowledge behind it” makes you a little itchy to go, it’s worth a look at what’s happening on the other side of the world, at Italy Trails’ older sister.
The Short Version
Baja California Travel was born in Mexico in 2016, when Adriano Ceccarelli, a Roman who moved to La Paz and came to know Baja inside out, turned his passion for travel into a job. Italy Trails came later, as its sister: the same philosophy brought to Italy, for anyone who wants to discover it from behind the wheel or in the saddle. Two very different roads, one shared belief: the best trips are the ones you drive yourself, through places worth taking your time over.
So if a link or a mention in the footer brought you here wondering what’s going on, now you know. It’s not a coincidence and it’s not a corporate merger: it’s the story of a man who left Rome to chase a desert that runs all the way to the sea, and who then decided to bring that same way of traveling back to his own country.
If a trip to Italy is on your list, you already know where to find us. And if a drive of more than 600 miles down a Mexican peninsula, with whales, cacti, and empty highways, sounds like your kind of trip too, Baja California Travel is waiting for you.