London | Six years ago, Australian Rob Potter-Sanders arrived in the southern Italian region of Puglia to fulfil his business and lifestyle dream: he bought the elegant ruin of a 16th-century manor house and began work on creating a luxury hotel. But this was Italy, where dreams can easily become Kafkaesque nightmares. At every turn he found himself entangled in rigid bureaucracy, stifling regulation and shonky business practices.

"The red tape is unimaginable, literally unbelievable," he says. "There are so many laws, and a lot of them conflict with each other – you have to choose which law to break. The whole system is very antiquated: it's loaded with taxes, and there's no flexibility in employment contracts."