Slow Life | 20 September 2008

Are you the driver?’ I asked. ‘No, I’m the owner,’ he replied, and I liked him immediately. It’s a lovely hotel, The Torre Maizza in Puglia, a walled Italian farm converted into a five-star gastro-spa, growing its own food and inhabiting its own time-zone. ‘Vitorrio,’ he said, shaking my hand and asking if I wanted to have dinner with him, and I liked him even more. There were so many things that I’d planned to do, that had nothing to do with being in Italy. I’d bought lots of stuff I had to catch up with, a guitar, coloured pencils, everything. I had plans. I always fail to foresee that going away, there’s always suddenly all this other new stuff to think about.

We zoomed along, the two of us in Vittorio’s tiny car to the ancient walled city of Ostuni, a lime-washed wedding cake, all lit up on top of a hill in the distance.