Like many seasoned travelers, I'd been burned by the promise of rustic lodging with multi-star amenities, a happy-sounding combination that often meant a working telephone in a stone chamber otherwise untouched by progress and its attendant conveniences, like reliable plumbing and regular maid service.
And the lodging in question was in the southern Italian region of , which I'd known to be an inconvenient place. I'd made work trips there in 2002 and 2003, when I was a reporter based in , and had marveled at the cramped, drab airport in the region's largest city, Bari.
It was fit for a Graham Greene novel, not a glossy travel brochure.
So when my friend Sylvie told me that old farmhouses less than an hour's drive south of Bari were being converted into cushy resorts, I felt more skepticism than curiosity. And when she gushed about the reputed beauteousness of the one she'd booked us into, I vowed to be charmed, not outraged, at the inevitable exposure of her gullibility.
The vacation would go so much easier that way.
Early one afternoon last September, we pulled up to our agrarian idyll, and I searched in vain for any traces of a farmhouse in the airbrushed campus of smooth whitewashed buildings before us. The buildings were fringed by palm trees and latticed by tidy gravel paths.
Off to their side glittered a huge, pristine swimming pool with a slatted wood deck.
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