Come November my wife and I make our way down from the Upper Rhine to the heel of Italy. It’s not especially easy to get from central Europe to the basso Salento—the stiletto of the large southernmost province known as Apulia or Puglia—at this time of year: Air Berlin offers a once-weekly flight to Brindisi from Munich, and if you forget to book it there’s the long-distance bus to Lecce, although the journey takes an entire day. But I have to say that for four years in a row we’ve managed to fly south in November, and even though last…