I'll admit I was already slightly frazzled before we even reached Ostuni. We'd flown into Bari, picked up the hire car, and I was navigating with that particular confidence that comes from having glanced at Google Maps exactly once. My partner was driving, the kids were bickering about whose turn it was with the tablet, and I was absolutely certain I'd memorised the route. I had not memorised the route. We ended up on a farm track somewhere outside Cisternino, surrounded by olive trees that looked like they'd been there since the Romans, with a goat giving me what I can only describe as a deeply judgmental stare through the windscreen. Forty minutes of increasingly tense three-point turns later, we found the proper road and I developed a healthy respect for Puglian signage.

The trullo appeared at the end of a dusty lane just as the afternoon light was turning everything golden, and I felt that lovely little shift in my chest that says you're properly on holiday now. Ours was one of those traditional conical-roofed places you see on postcards, whitewashed walls glowing against the red soil and all those ancient olive trees stretching out in every direction. The children immediately forgot their tablet grievances and started arguing about who got which bedroom instead, which felt like progress of a sort.

Stepping inside for the first time, that thick stone wall coolness hit me like a welcome drink of water. The place smelled of clean linen and something faintly herby, rosemary perhaps, drifting in from the garden. The living space was simple and unpretentious, terracotta floors and wooden furniture that had clearly been chosen for sturdiness rather than style, though the two managed to meet quite happily. I ran my hand along the curved wall of the main cone and felt slightly ridiculous for being so pleased by a shape, but there's something genuinely comforting about architecture that has evolved purely to do its job properly.

I made straight for the kitchen, because I am that person who judges a holiday let entirely by its chopping board situation. Decent knives, thankfully, and a proper coffee pot rather than some flimsy pod machine that would have broken my heart. The fridge was already humming away, and I caught myself planning the evening's aperitivo before we'd even unpacked the car. The patio doors opened onto a covered terrace with a table big enough for lazy lunches that stretch into dinner, and beyond that the pool glinted with that particular turquoise you only seem to get in this part of Italy.

The kids had already located the barbecue and were conducting some kind of inspection, while my partner stood at the edge of the property looking out towards Ostuni itself, the white town perched on its hill in the distance like a pile of sugar cubes. I joined him with two cold beers I'd found in the welcome pack, and we stood there in that comfortable silence that comes from knowing you don't need to do anything more ambitious today than figure out which local shop sells the best mozzarella.

That evening, as the swallows started their evening circuits overhead and the cicadas tuned up for their nightly performance, I burned the first batch of bread on the barbecue. Classic overenthusiasm, trying to cook everything at once while simultaneously opening wine and fielding questions about whether trulli have WiFi. We ate slightly charred bruschetta anyway, sitting round that big table with our feet bare and the warm stone still radiating the day's heat, and I thought about how often I complicate things that don't need complicating. The goat had been right to judge me, really. But here, with the olive trees rustling in the evening breeze and my family temporarily united in mocking my bread skills, none of that mattered. We had a week of this simplicity ahead of us, and I was absolutely ready to be the person who didn't need to rush anywhere or achieve anything beyond a decent tan and perhaps slightly improved grilling technique.