DEIR AL-QAMAR, Lebanon: “The view isn’t so great now, but in the morning …” The hotel manager, Nadim Zoghbi, trailed off as he showed us to a duplex suite at Deir al-Oumara, a recently restored 19th-century Ottoman-era villa.

Zoghbi pointed into the darkness that surrounded our suite’s long balcony on all sides, toward a village twinkling with light on a neighboring mountaintop. “That’s Baaqlin, where George Clooney’s fiancée is from,” he said.