I have never been so happy to see a row of dusty olive trees in my life. After six hours of driving from Bari airport, two wrong turns near Matera, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted Metaponto was "recalculating" somewhere in the Ionian Sea, we finally crunched up the gravel drive of our holiday cottage. I was gripping the steering wheel like a man who had just survived a minor military operation. My wife was calmly eating the last of the airport biscuits. The children were asleep in attitudes that suggested future chiropractic bills.

The mishap, though. I must tell you about the mishap.

Somewhere outside Bernalda, convinced I was taking a scenic shortcut, I followed a sign that looked promisingly like it pointed towards the sea. It did not point towards the sea. It pointed towards a farm track, a very committed herd of goats, and an elderly gentleman in a fiat panda who simply shook his head at me with the weary resignation of someone who had watched many tourists make this exact error. I had to reverse for nearly half a mile while my wife made helpful comments about my spatial awareness. The goats were unimpressed. I have rarely felt more thoroughly British.

But then we arrived. And the thing about arriving at a cottage in Metaponto, after all that chaos, is how immediately it rewards your nonsense. The property sat among those olive trees I mentioned, low and whitewashed with a terrace that looked out towards the distant shimmer of the Ionian. The garden had that particular Italian quality of being slightly unkempt in the most deliberate and beautiful way, herbs growing where they pleased, a lemon tree dropping fruit with theatrical timing. Our youngest woke up, looked around, and asked if we lived here now. I understood the impulse.

Inside, the rooms were cool and tiled, the sort of cool that makes you realise how much unnecessary stuff you own at home. The kitchen was compact in that way that forces a family to actually cooperate, which we did for approximately eleven minutes before reverting to our usual system of me cooking while everyone else drifted in and out making encouraging noises. There was a barbecue outside that looked like it had witnessed decades of summer evenings. I immediately planned to use it badly.

The first evening, we did almost nothing. This is worth stating because doing nothing is, I am increasingly convinced, the entire point of a place like this. We sat on that terrace with bread from the bakery in Metaponto village, cheese that tasted like it had opinions, and tomatoes that actually tasted of tomatoes, which always feels like a small miracle when you are used to supermarket ones. The children chased lizards between the olive trees. My wife opened wine and did not mention the goat incident once. The sun went down in that slow, generous Mediterranean way, and somewhere nearby a neighbour was cooking something that made me deeply envious.

I found myself thinking, as I do on these holidays, about how complicated I make ordinary life. The sat nav, the schedules, the constant sense of needing to be somewhere else doing something else. Here the complication was simply being together in a small space, figuring out which tap ran hot, remembering to buy mosquito coils, arguing gently about whether to walk to the beach tomorrow or simply not walk anywhere at all. It felt like enough. It felt like more than enough, actually.

We fell asleep that first night to the sound of cicadas and the distant murmur of the sea, full of simple food and the particular tiredness that comes from having finally, against reasonable odds, arrived exactly where you meant to be.