I have never been so happy to see a petrol station in my life. Three hours into our drive from Bari airport, somewhere past Matera where the landscape turns properly wild, I realised my partner had been right about one thing: we definitely should have stopped for fuel in Taranto. The little hire car had been flashing its warning light for a good forty minutes, and I had been doing my best impression of someone completely relaxed about it, which mostly involved humming badly and refusing to make eye contact.

We limped into a Total just outside Nova Siri Marina with what felt like fumes to spare. I bought a packet of taralli and a very small espresso to celebrate our survival, then promptly dropped the entire packet down the gap between the driver's seat and the centre console. We arrived at the Nova Siri property with me fishing crumbs out of the upholstery and my dignity in similar tatters.

The villa itself made up for everything. A proper whitewashed affair with a terrace that looked out towards the Ionian Sea, close enough that you could smell the salt and hear the distant clatter of a beach bar setting up for lunch. The key was in the lockbox exactly where promised, which felt like a small miracle given my track record with holiday arrangements. I once turned up to a cottage in Cornwall a week early and had to pretend I was just "checking the area" to the bemused owner.

By now it was past two o'clock and we were both ravenous in that slightly desperate way that makes reasonable people consider eating service station sandwiches. Instead, we did what any sensible person does in Basilicata: we found the nearest market and let chaos unfold around us.

Nova Siri's weekly market happens on Thursday mornings, but the little alimentari in the old town were more than sufficient for our immediate needs. I am still haunted by the pecorino I bought from a man who spoke no English and communicated entirely through gestures that I choose to interpret as "this one is excellent, you have excellent taste, please take my entire stock." We emerged with that cheese, a length of lucanica sausage that smelled faintly of wild fennel, three tomatoes that actually tasted of something, and a bottle of Aglianico that the shopkeeper had opened for us to try with what I can only describe as aggressive hospitality.

Back at the villa, I attempted to cook. This is where I must be honest with you. I own approximately four cookbooks and have read them thoroughly while eating takeaway. The kitchen at the Nova Siri was better equipped than my own flat, with a proper gas hob and a terrace door I could fling open to let out the smoke. My first attempt at pasta con cime di rapa ended with the rapa slightly too al dente and the pasta slightly too soft, but eaten on that terrace with the cheese and the wine and the sound of someone else's barbecue drifting over from two gardens away, it tasted like the best meal I had ever made.

The local eating rhythm took some adjusting to. Everything shuts for three hours in the afternoon, which initially felt inconvenient and quickly became something I aggressively defended. The bar on the corner near the villa did excellent coffee from six in the morning and excellent spritz from six in the evening, with nothing much in between except the owner watching football on a small television. I grew to love him.

We found our local, eventually. Not a pub in the British sense, but a family-run trattoria ten minutes walk towards the marina where the owner recognised us on the second visit and the third visit brought complimentary limoncello that I suspect was homemade and definitely was strong enough to strip paint. The seafood linguine was the sort of dish that makes you angry at every other seafood linguine you have ever eaten. I asked after the recipe and received a twenty-minute explanation in Italian that I understood perhaps one word in ten of, mostly involving hand gestures towards the sea.

The villa's barbecue saw heavy use. I became briefly obsessed with grilling local swordfish, which the fishmonger would prepare with lemon and breadcrumbs if you asked nicely and looked sufficiently incompetent. My partner handled the actual fire management while I prepared salads that grew progressively more ambitious as the holiday went on. By day six I was putting peaches in with the tomatoes and calling it "a thing I read about," which is how I know the wine was working.

Breakfast became a ritual of whatever we had gathered the day before: yesterday's bread toasted and rubbed with garlic, the last of the pecorino crumbled over, figs from a tree we passed on a walk that I definitely did not consider climbing. The coffee was never as good as the bar's, but consumed in a dressing gown on that terrace, it did not need to be.

On our final evening, I attempted to recreate one of the trattoria's simpler dishes, a potato and pepper stew that I had eaten three times and craved daily since. It was not the same. It was probably not even close. But sitting there with the last of the Aglianico, watching the light change over the olive trees, I felt that particular holiday sadness of knowing you have eaten better than you will eat again for some time, and that the crumbs in the hire car were probably still there, and that none of it mattered very much at all.