Something else we didn't know until later was that Rudi was following us the whole time. From his command center deep underground in downtown Dallas (or so I picture the scene), he was in constant touch with concierges, managers, restaurateurs, and so on. We glided through the week oblivious, assuming that the hotel had delivered a plate of fruit on its own initiative or that the restaurant owner had shown us his wine room out of personal pride. But no, the hand of Rudi Steele was constantly rewriting the script as we unknowingly played ourselves in a fantasy of his devising.

Despite our best efforts, I fear we may have let Rudi down a bit. Take the matter of the driver who picked us up at the airport, took us for a day of sightseeing along the Amalfi Coast, and then drove us to Rome at the end of our stay. I had e-mailed Rudi that my wife is a nervous passenger, and could we please have a driver of conservative temperament—not some Italian hotshot—along those winding coastal roads. I was pleased with myself: This seemed pretty demanding, the sort of request that might come from the movie stars who are among Rudi's clients. He e-mailed me back in his unique style, which depends more on random paragraph breaks and rhetorical flourishes than traditional sentence structure or punctuation: "I have reconfirmed all—hotels and also drivers, making certain that the driver calm any Italian temper [new paragraph] and proceed from point to point in a calm manner. Trust me—there is nothing to worry as to the drivers [new paragraph] we use are all very sensitive to clients wishes and comforts."

He then turned to the matter of the car: "Just so we have the right car for you. Please let me know how much luggage you intend to take [new paragraph] so it will comfortably fit into the trunk. I don't think a stretch limousine is necessary—I suggest just [new paragraph] a comfortable sedan or even better, a little van or SUV which are much better for sightseeing as one [new paragraph] sits up higher. On the other hand, along the Amalfi one might just want to sit lower in order not to [new paragraph] see the drops on the side of the road—I am thinking of Patty. You tell me." We hadn't given Rudi much to chew on, so he wasn't about to let this morsel about nervousness in cars get away without being thoroughly masticated. But we were daunted by Rudi's expectations about luggage. We live so completely in the world of inverted snobbery—where status accrues to those who pack light and people would rather die than check a bag at the airport—that we were startled to discover the continued existence of an older world. Think of movies where cranes lift huge trunks onto cruise ships. One of many retro aspects of this particular trip was our determination to pack whatever we wanted and—caution be damned!—check our luggage. But the thought that we might pack too much for an ordinary car trunk—even a European one—had not occurred to us.