Today’s PLACES features Francis Ford Coppola’s 9-suite hotel, the Palazzo Margherita, in the director’s ancestral hometown in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. Originally built in 1892, the hotel was designed by Jacques Grange. In an interview with Vogue, according to the director, “Running a hotel is like making a movie; it’s all about putting on a show. You start with an idea, a theme–a leisure palazzo, for example–and then you pay attention to a million details. And whether you’re staying in a hotel or watching a film, it’s those details that provide the experience.”

Best known as the Academy Award-winning director of the “Godfather” trilogy and “Apocalypse Now,” Coppola first came to the town of Bernalda in 1962. His grandfather, Agostino Coppola, left “Bernalda Bella” as he always called it, in 1904, never to return. From that first visit, when he spoke little Italian and knocked on doors to find his relatives, Coppola was regularly draw back to the place he calls “the real Italy.” –from the Huffington Post