It is a truth more or less universally acknowledged that the four most beautiful words you can hear are: “You have lost weight.” But what are the four sweetest words in the English language to which one can give breath? I’m not sure there is a consensus on this, but “Bring the Bentley round!” must be fairly close to the top of anyone’s short list, and I had the pleasure of uttering this delightful phrase one late-September morning to the front-desk manager of the entirely appropriately named Hotel Splendido in Portofino.

The day before, someone had thoughtfully left me a Bentley Azure in the garage of the Splendido, with which I was to complete a near 1,000-kilometre dawdle down through Italy, finishing up at Ravello on the Amalfi coast.

Italy has long exerted an attraction over Englishmen, and it was with the intention of putting the Grand back in the Grand Tour that I lowered the hood of the convertible, flexed my big toe and nearly mowed down the manager and staff of the hotel who had lined up to wave me off.

The great thing about Portofino is the whole of the town is some sort of Italian national monument – this means you practically need planning permission to open a window: potentially irritating if you happen to own a house here and want to improve it, but great if, like me, you only drop by once a decade.

The current edition of the Lonely Planet guide attempts a priggish irony, saying that this is the place to be “should you find yourself running low on Gucci or Cartier”. Sadly, I was unable to find a Cartier boutique, but I was rewarded with the sight of large carrier bags from Louis Vuitton being loaded onto the Splendido minibus – clearly someone had been running low on luggage.

In fact, the Lonely Planet guide proves useless to the modern grand tourist, including, as it does, the Italian for dreary phrases such as “youth hostel” or “Where is a cheap hotel?” at the expense of bits of the lingo that might prove useful. Hard as I looked, I could find no words for “Please could you warm up the Bentley and bring it round to the front of the hotel, but not before my friend Count Franz Larosee has finished his breakfast Cohiba.” The Count seems to accompany me on all long-distance Bentley jaunts. As well as being perfectly at home at the Splendido, where he put the staff through their paces, he was a darn sight more use in Italy than a copy of the Lonely Planet, which had nothing to say about Forte dei Marmi, the Tuscan Dolce Vita resort favoured by the late Avvocato Agnelli.

As we purred to a halt outside a rather glitzy pizzeria, stuffed with old men and their listless, long-legged, long-haired girlfriends, I could see why the Lonely Planet had turned its nose up at it. Like Portofino, the place is a shopper’s paradise, and it was the Count who suggested that in future I might plan my drives around the locations of luxury boutiques. It makes perfect sense to stop at every Loro Piana shop – the one we saw in Portofino is as captivating as any Renaissance church. And talking of the Renaissance, I can’t help feeling that one can have too much of a good thing. Take Lucca. A nice enough town: the only problem was that we could not get the Bentley through the walls of the old city.

Given that our route avoided motorways, I became familiar with one of the great features of Italy’s minor roads: the three-wheeled Piaggio Ape. In English it sounds simian. It is the sort of thing that a monkey could indeed operate – and from the way they were driven, it appeared that a few were. What they lack in speed (I cannot recall one topping 30mph), their drivers compensate for with a fatalistic and flamboyant abandon. I have to admit that I gained a sneaking admiration for these ingenious vehicles, which serve as everything from mobile fruit stalls to mini meat wagons – ape is Italian for “bee”.

What with the rain that was now tipping down, and the Apes, the prospect of another frustrating couple of hours swatting away Vespas during the rush hour put me off Rome, so I headed for Porto Ercole, which I had long wanted to visit, and found a couple of rooms free in the Pellicano. The infinite possibility of diverting from the plan is one of the charms of the motoring tour, especially when

the diversions are as charming as the Pellicano. The Pellicano is one of those glamorous survivors from an era when individuals of taste and means could start up high-glam hotels in off-piste locations and still have the beautiful people, the fast set, the foam-atop-the-cappuccino of cafe society, pitch up for their summer hols.

In this case, my choice was vindicated by the presence of one of the Count’s relatives, a dashing prince who was busy entertaining his mistress. By chance, this prince had been planning to move on to the Hotel Caruso in Ravello, but whether because it was too far from his palace in eastern Europe or because it was where we were next heading, he could not tear himself away from the understatedly stylish Pellicano. I have to admit, it was a wrench to leave and, getting lost in the shanty towns around Vesuvius 200 kilometres later, I was starting to think we should have stayed.

No longer content to persecute us with Piaggio Apes, the tiny twisting roads up, then down, to the Amalfi coast served up lorries driven by men who could barely see over the steering wheels of their juggernauts. To give you an idea of the sort of people I was now sharing the road with, one of them had chosen the dashboard to display his talisman… a human skull.

Happily, like so many of the best places in Italy, the Hotel Caruso was mercifully absent from the Lonely Planet guide, and with my co-driver, who was now singing a German song from the early 1960s called Ein Kleiner Italiener aus Napoli, I needed to fear neither Ape nor pantechnicon. And so, with the sun setting dramatically over the Amalfi coast, we made our final destination without even a stone chip on the coachwork.

If it wanted, the Caruso could fill itself entirely with honeymooning Americans; this is Italy as it is in the movies, all prego this, ecco that, and the sort of setting that has one reaching for superlatives. However, the hotel sensibly seems to operate a quota system. So this charming place carved out of an ancient palace clinging to the jagged cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean welcomes the sort of people who do not read Lonely Planet.

Apparently I had just missed a family conclave of Agnellis, during which Ravello had been besieged, not by Barbary pirates as in the old days, but by paparrazi keen to snap the Fiat heir, Lapo Elkann, whose conscientious party-going had put him into rehab.

This would have been the perfect place to unwind, smoke some cigars, sip freshly squeezed strawberry juice, flick through Harold Acton’s The Bourbons of Naples, by what is probably the best-located swimming pool in Europe, and totter around doing my best to impersonate Gore Vidal, who lived here until recently. But the Count was having none of it.

Having made our way down through Italy in lousy weather and on worse roads without putting so much as a scratch on the car, he wanted me to drive the notorious coast road to Naples so that he could visit the tailor Rubinacci. He had apparently long cherished a dream of having a Prince of

Wales check suit made. And so it was that we set off, supremely unconcerned by the fact that even the Piaggio Apes had difficulty negotiating the slim, sinuous Amalfi roads, let alone our superyacht of a motor vehicle.

At first it was mildly amusing to drive past shops and cafes so close that I needed only to reach out to help myself to a coffee or newspaper as we passed. But one thing led to another and I found myself in a discussion about the highway code with an irate coach driver who communicated mainly by means of a gesture involving placing the tips of his fingers against the end of

his thumb and waving the assembly of digits an inch or so from my nose. I could not but construe this as mildly offensive. He was trying to make me understand that the Bentley was too big for such a road. As a result, the Count was late for his fitting.

How to get there

Nick Foulkes travelled with Orient Express; www.orient-express.com ; 020 7960 0500. Hotel Splendido, from £694 a night for a double room inc. breakfast and a meal. Hotel Caruso, from £511 a night for a double room. Il Pellicano, from £387 per night for a double room including breakfast; www.pellicanohotel.com

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