I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving vehicle quite so badly either. The journey down to Metaponto was going swimmingly until it wasn't, which is to say I got spectacularly lost somewhere between Potenza and the coast, convinced I was taking a scenic route when in fact I was simply driving in circles through olive groves that all looked identical. Three times I passed the same wizened old man leaning on a gate. The third time, he didn't even look up. Just raised one hand in a sort of resigned salute. I had become that tourist.

The mishap that really sealed it, though, was the fuel. I'd been so smug about remembering to fill up before leaving Bari, so pleased with my foresight, that I hadn't bothered to check whether Italian petrol stations take the same cards as home. They do not, apparently, at the little automated ones in the middle of nowhere. There I sat, in a hire car that smelled faintly of previous occupants' sunscreen, watching my fuel gauge hover somewhere between "anxious" and "call a tow truck," in thirty-two degree heat with the windows down because I dared not run the air conditioning. The season had turned early, the guidebook said. May was behaving like July. I believed it. I could feel it in the back of my thighs sticking to the seat.

By some miracle of rural Italian kindness, a woman in a faded blue Fiat pulled over and explained, through elaborate hand gestures and three words of shared vocabulary, that there was a manned station another ten kilometres on. I made it with fumes to spare, and the attendant, a teenager who looked deeply unimpressed by my sweating gratitude, filled the tank while I stood there like a lemon, guzzling warm water from a bottle I'd found rolling around in the footwell.

The approach to Metaponto itself, when I finally found it, was almost embarrassingly beautiful. Almost enough to make the whole palaver feel worthwhile, though I wasn't quite ready to admit that yet. The Ionian coast stretched out in this particular shade of blue that photographs never quite capture, and the pine trees along the shore were throwing long afternoon shadows that spoke of lengthening days. That was the thing about this time of year, I realised, pulling up to the property. The light had a quality to it, generous and golden, not yet the harsh white of high summer. You could feel the season building, gathering itself, but it hadn't quite peaked. There was still a softness in the evenings, still a breeze that carried the smell of the sea rather than just the heat bouncing off it.

The property itself was one of those low, whitewashed numbers that seem to grow out of the landscape rather than sit on top of it. A small garden, a terrace, that particular stillness of a place that spends most of the year empty and is just beginning to wake up for the season. My neighbour, an Italian couple from Milan who'd arrived the day before, were already established on their terrace with aperitivi, and they waved me over with the easy confidence of people who had not recently been lost in olive groves. They told me the water was still brisk, that they'd tried it that morning and emerged making noises like startled penguins, but that the afternoon was perfect for doing absolutely nothing at all.

They were right, of course. That first evening, I sat on my own terrace with a bottle of local Aglianico that I'd picked up in a panic at the petrol station, watching the sky turn that particular apricot colour it does before proper sunset, and I felt the season working on me. The warmth of the day still rising from the tiles, the first tentative mosquito, the distant sound of someone preparing dinner with the windows open. It wasn't high summer yet, with its crowds and its prices and its relentless, battering heat. It was the edge of something, the sweet spot, and I had stumbled into it by accident, by getting lost, by nearly running out of petrol, by every small mishap that had delivered me here at exactly this moment, on exactly this day, when the season was turning and the light was right and the water was still brisk enough to make you feel alive when you finally worked up the courage to jump in.