The host who will be at the door

For over 25 years my job was to take demanding, curious, well-travelled people to places that do not appear in brochures — and to make those places feel personal.

I flew and guided them on flying safaris across continents: in Namibia alone more than ninety times, thirty-odd each in Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. Once from Namibia to Tahiti, another time Namibia to Greenland, down to Ushuaia, up to the Bering Sea and home again. I was the pilot, the host, the guide, the fixer, the one who knew where leopards were more than a myth and which sunset was worth waking up for. I learned that luxury, for my guests, was never marble and monogrammed slippers. It is knowledge, access, timing, intimacy and someone who cares whether your week works.

Then I came home. I looked at the hills of Tuscia — many miles of rolling hills, Etruscan tombs, ghost villages, volcanic lakes, badlands and hamlets that Italians themselves drive past — and realised I had been showing the world to people while my own country stayed a secret. So together with my wife Monica we restored Il Casone, and I started doing here what I did out there.

When you arrive, I am the one who opens the door. During the week I am the one who tells you that today the light on Civita is better at eight than at six, who calls the trattoria that does not answer emails, who reroutes the day because your grandson wants to see the mammoth fossil after all — while Monica makes sure there is a homemade tart on the breakfast table every morning. Her recipes come from a single handwritten book that belonged to her mother, now made with the jam from our own fruit. I am not a receptionist. Il Casone does not have one.

In all these years I also learned that guests are not always interested in their guide's stories. So Monica and I will always be there, and always discreetly: like a good book, read us hungrily when you want to know something, and put us down on the bedside table whenever you would rather be lost in your own thoughts, in your own privacy.

Your week here is my week too. That is the whole idea.