When Anna Ackerman met Dino Maglio, the man who was to host her in Italy, at Padua’s bus station, her first feeling was unease. Her body registered a faint alarm. “It was such a strange feeling, but it’s such a concrete memory,” says Ackerman. Maglio had arrived late to collect Ackerman and her friend. He was fast talking, a little frantic. “There was something about his movements,” she says, “erratic, all over the place. I remember feeling that there was something off about him, which I tried to reason in my mind. Maybe it’s traveller nerves.”
This was March 2013 when Ackerman was just 20, travelling independently for the first time. Padua was her first stop, and she had found Maglio through couchsurfing.com, a platform that connects travellers who need a free place to stay with hosts around the world. In 2013, the website was growing fast, with new private investment and 11 million members. It was, according to its founder, a “trust network” - a community of like-minded people.
