Italy with INTRAV

My husband, John, and I spent a wonderful 16 days in Italy with INTRAV (11969 Westline Industrial Dr., St. Louis, MO 63146; 800/456-8100 or www.intrav.com). We combined two tours, “Tuscany and the Cinque Terre,” Oct. 8-16, ’05, and “Apulia, an Undiscovered Gem,” Oct. 16-23, each with a land price of $2,495 per person.

The first tour was based in Lucca at Hotel Albergo Celide, a lovely small hotel just outside the city’s Renaissance walls.

Day trips included a full day in Florence and an afternoon at a 16th-century villa in the countryside near Lucca. The day trip to Cinque Terre utilized coach, trains, walking and boats for transport. After walking the “Love Path,” we had lunch in Vernazza. A trip to Pisa and a day in San Gimignano rounded out the Tuscany half of the tour.

The group size was advertised as 30 maximum, but there were 38 people. An INTRAV staff member from St. Louis and local guides provided excellent information and were very helpful at all times.

The second tour was aptly titled. Our first base was in Bari at the luxe Hotel Villa Romanazzi Carducci, a lovely modern hotel set in the park-like grounds of an 18th-century villa. Our room was large, with a king-sized bed and large windows. The breakfast room had a whole table of fruit plus a special-order cook.

Our tour guide, Lucia Ubertiello (an independent contractor for INTRAV), worked with her coach drivers to find ways to cover as much of Apulia as possible without very much backtracking. She provided us excellent maps so we could track our travels each day.

From our Bari base we drove along the Adriatic and visited the 12th-century duomo in Barletta, then toured the Castel del Monte. The next day took us to the trulli (limestone dwellings) region and the town of Alborobello, where we learned how and why the trulli were built.

On the way to our next base, in Lecce, we visited the Castellana Caves. Hotel Albergo delle Palme was our home for the final four nights. This is not a hotel we can recommend very highly, and we have communicated with INTRAV about this.

The draperies at the end of the hall on our floor were hanging in tatters. Our room was small, with bare floors. There was one chair and no light anywhere near it; we had to sit on the bed to have light for reading, stitching or whatever. The breakfast room was mostly satisfactory, but there was almost no fruit on the buffet, this in an area where fruit abounded in the markets. However, the food in the restaurant on the lower level was quite good, and our farewell banquet was lovely.

We toured the city of Lecce and learned about the Baroque architecture as it evolved there. The following day we traveled to the Salento Peninsula and the town of Gallipoli. The week ended with a full-day trip to Otranto high above the Adriatic. We drove on to Santa Maria di Leuca at the very tip of the “boot heel” of Italy, where we had lunch before returning to Lecce for our “farewell party and banquet.”

Our air arrangements were made by INTRAV, and our flights from Portland to Florence on Delta, Air France and Alitalia were on time and trouble free. The trip between Pisa and Bari (from the first tour to the second) on Alitalia was bad — late departure, and a canceled connecting flight resulted in our missing lunch and the Bari city tour.

Returning home, on Delta and Alitalia, it was impossible to get boarding passes and seat assignments for more than one segment of the trip at a time, and we stood in long lines at Milan and in Atlanta to get them.

Delta flight 75 (Milan to Atlanta) on Oct. 23 was wonderful, with one of the most attentive cabin crews we have ever experienced. In contrast, on Delta flight 1199, Atlanta to Portland, we had paid for first/business-class tickets, only to find that the seats were jammed together so there was no legroom and no possibility of reclining. Drink service was minimal, and “dinner” was slapped on the trays, with no choices offered.

All in all, it was a wonderful trip, and a lot of my high school Latin class history came alive for me. We were extremely fortunate to have clear blue skies except for the last day when there was a rain shower in Leuca for a few minutes.

— JOHN & NADINE PURCELL, Ashland, OR