I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me down a track that looked like it had last seen a cart and donkey. Twelve hours after leaving Gatwick, via a delayed flight, a queue at Bari airport that moved slower than my nan at a car boot sale, and a hire car with air conditioning that wheezed like a broken accordion, I was finally in Puglia. Ceglie Messapica was meant to be twenty minutes away. The sat nav made it forty-five, mostly spent reversing out of olive groves and apologising to startled goats.

The mishap came at the final hurdle. I had stopped at a little alimentari for supplies, you know the drill, bread, cheese, a bottle of red that cost less than a London coffee. Got back to the car, reversed without looking properly, and crunched straight into a low stone wall that had been standing there since before my great-great-grandfather was born. The wall was fine. The hire car's bumper now had a dent the shape of Puglia itself. I sat there for a good minute, just staring at it, wondering if I could blame a rogue tractor. I could not. I was the rogue tractor.

By the time I actually found the property, up a winding lane flanked by dry stone walls and those twisted olive trees that look like they've seen things, I was in that peculiar state of exhausted delirium where everything is either hilarious or deeply tragic. The sun was dropping fast, painting everything in that warm apricot light that makes Puglia look like someone has applied an Instagram filter to reality. The trullo and its attached lamia sat there looking impossibly picturesque, all whitewashed walls and conical roofs, like something from a storybook I had half forgotten.

I fumbled with the key safe, dropped the keys twice, and finally stumbled through the door into cool silence. The interior smelled of stone and faintly of rosemary from the bushes outside. The kitchen was simple, proper Puglian style, not trying to be anything fancy, just functional and honest. I dumped my bags, opened that cheap red wine with my teeth practically, and collapsed onto a chair in the small courtyard. The pool glimmered in the last light, utterly tempting and utterly ignored for the moment because I could not have moved if the house had caught fire.

What struck me first was the quiet. Not silence exactly, there were cicadas going at it full pelt, and somewhere a dog having opinions about something. But the absence of human noise, of traffic, of that constant background hum you stop noticing in cities until it is gone. It felt almost intrusive, that quiet, like walking into a room where everyone had been talking about you. I found myself talking aloud to no one, just to fill it, then laughing at myself for doing so. There is something about arriving alone in a strange place that strips away whatever performance you usually keep up. I was too tired to be anyone other than exactly who I was, dented bumper and all.

I did not explore Ceglie Messapica town that evening. I ate bread and cheese standing at the kitchen counter, drank too much wine too quickly, and fell asleep on the outdoor sofa with a single candle burning in an old glass jar. Woke up at three in the morning, stiff and confused, with a line of ants investigating my abandoned plate and the moon so bright over the olive groves that I could have read a newspaper. Stumbled properly to bed eventually, leaving everything as it was.

That first night set the tone, I think. Not polished, not curated, just real and slightly ridiculous. The kind of arrival that reminds you that holidays are not escapes from yourself so much as meetings with yourself, and sometimes that person is an idiot who dents hire cars and falls asleep outside. I would not have had it any other way.