I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once got lost in their own local Tesco car park. The drive down from Bari airport had been straightforward enough, but the final stretch to our masseria outside Brindisi was where things got properly Italian. The tarmac gave way to a gravel track, which gave way to something I can only describe as "agricultural suggestion," and somewhere between a rusted tractor and a very judgmental goat, I became convinced we were trespassing through someone's actual farm. My partner, ever the optimist, kept insisting the booking confirmation mentioned "authentic rural setting." I kept insisting that "authentic" need not mean "potentially actionable."

We arrived in late May, which I now realise is the sweet spot that every travel blogger bangs on about but nobody actually explains properly. The heat had not yet reached its summer cruelty, but the spring wildflowers were still doing their thing along the dry stone walls, all purples and yellows that looked almost aggressively picturesque. I say this with the weary tone of someone who spent twenty minutes trying to photograph them while being eaten alive by something tiny and enthusiastic. Seasonal transition in Puglia is not gentle. It is a handover between two bosses who do not particularly like each other.

The masseria itself appeared suddenly, white walls glowing against the red earth in that particular late afternoon light that makes everything look like a film set. Our host, a woman called Rosa who moved with the unhurried confidence of someone who has never once checked a weather app, greeted us with iced lemon water and the information that we were her first guests of the season. This meant, she explained, that the pool had only just been uncovered that morning and the water would be "fresh." This turned out to be Pugliese for "technically still winter." I watched my partner lower himself in with the facial expression of a man discovering a medical problem he had not previously known existed.

What struck me immediately was how the season shaped absolutely everything. The outdoor kitchen was still being assembled, wooden trellises waiting for grape vines that were currently more aspiration than reality. Rosa's vegetable garden was in that productive awkward phase where everything was either too early or too late, so our welcome basket contained six enormous artichokes and a philosophical explanation about patience. The olive trees surrounding the property looked almost silver in the shifting light, their new growth still pale against the older, darker foliage. I found out later that we had missed the harvest by months and the flowering by weeks, caught in that in-between period where the trees simply exist, being ancient and impressive without any particular seasonal fanfare.

That evening, we walked the property's perimeter as the temperature dropped with the suddenness that makes you understand why Italians talk about "la sera" as its own distinct entity. The cicadas had not yet started their summer screaming, so there was an almost English quiet, broken only by distant dogs and something in the undergrowth that I chose to believe was a hedgehog. We could smell the sea without quite being able to see it, that particular salt-and-heat combination that makes you hungry for dinner before you have properly processed lunch.

I stood there, slightly sunburned in that way that happens in May when you mistakenly believe the sun is still your friend, and felt the particular relief of having arrived somewhere at exactly the right wrong time. Too late for some things, too early for others, perfectly positioned for the experience of being present without expectation. Rosa had left us a bottle of her own olive oil, cloudy and green and tasting aggressively of something I lacked the vocabulary to describe. "Last autumn," she said, though she need not have. You could taste the season in it, could almost reconstruct the harvest from the peppery finish.

The next morning I would attempt to make coffee in the outdoor kitchen and create a small disaster involving a moka pot and my own hubris. But that first evening, watching the light change over olive trees older than my country's entire concept of itself, I understood something about seasonal travel that I had previously only pretended to grasp. You do not visit a place despite its timing. You visit it because of it, even when the pool freezes your extremities and the artichokes require research.

The goat, I should mention, watched us leave the following morning with what I can only describe as sustained professional interest. I still do not know whose goat it was. This feels appropriately Pugliese, somehow.