L'Andana Con Brio

The proper way to review a car is to push it to its limits, flooring the accelerator and screeching round hairpin bends to discover its strengths and weaknesses. In much the same way, it is the duty of every travel writer to subject the hotels they visit to really robust test drives.

So Maurizio Romani, the general manager at L'Andana , a deluxe establishment in Tuscany, may remember me as the Guest from Hell: high maintenance, capricious and, quite frankly, badly behaved. But I was only doing my job — with assistance from my husband Andy and in...