I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's patience than during our final approach to the trullo outside Ostuni. Three hours of driving from Bari, fortified by mediocre airport coffee and a packet of crisps, and we were utterly lost on a dirt track flanked by ancient olive trees that looked like they had been personally planted by the Romans. The sat nav kept insisting we had arrived. We had not arrived. We had, in fact, reversed into a low stone wall with an almighty crunch that made my partner, Mark, develop a nervous twitch he still has not quite shaken.

The wall, as it turned out, belonged to Signor Benedetto, who emerged from his own trullo wearing a flat cap and an expression of magnificent indifference to our distress. He was eighty if he was a day, with hands like twisted roots and a cigarette dangling from his lip that somehow never fell. Through a spectacular pantomime of gestures and my GCSE Italian, we established that we were approximately two hundred metres from our destination but on entirely the wrong side of a dry stone boundary. He found this hilarious. He laughed until he wheezed, then insisted on guiding us personally, walking ahead of our crawling car with the unhurried pace of a man who had never once in his life checked a watch.

Our actual landlord, a jovial fellow called Giacomo, was waiting at the property with a bottle of Primitivo and the resigned air of a man accustomed to guests arriving in various states of automotive damage. He showed us round the conical-roofed trullo with theatrical pride, pointing out the thick whitewashed walls and the peculiar little pinnacle on top called a pinnacolo, which he claimed warded off evil spirits. I asked if it worked on reversing drivers. He looked at me blankly, then roared with laughter and clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to bruise.

The trullo was enchanting, of course, cool and dim inside despite the blazing June afternoon, with a kitchen that looked like someone's nonna had just stepped out. Giacomo explained that his mother still made the ceramic plates on the wall, then produced a bowl of olives that tasted of sunshine and something ineffably ancient. He talked for twenty minutes about the olive harvest, about his cousin's disputed inheritance of a neighbouring grove, about the American couple last month who had tried to pay for everything in travellers cheques like it was 1987. He was a man who loved a story, who gathered them like his mother gathered wild oregano.

That evening, walking into Ostuni's old town for dinner, we encountered Signora Pia sitting outside her house on a folding chair, guarding a bucket of figs with the intensity of a nightclub bouncer. She interrogated us about where we were staying, who had recommended it, whether Giacomo had charged us fairly. Satisfied with our answers, she filled a paper bag with figs and refused payment, waving away my euros with theatrical offence. "Per gli inglesi," she said, with a generosity that felt slightly like pity.

The restaurant owner, a younger man called Domenico with elaborate tattoos and a surprising devotion to traditional Pugliese cooking, recognised us immediately as Giacomo's guests. News travels through these white-washed alleys faster than broadband. He recommended the orecchiette with cime di rapa, then sat with us between courses to complain about his brother-in-law's incompetence at grilling fish. It was performative, affectionate, utterly unhurried. We were not customers; we were temporary characters in an ongoing drama.

By the time we stumbled back to the trullo under a moon so bright it felt ostentatious, I understood something I had not grasped on arrival. The mishap with the wall, the wandering sat nav, the absurdity of two exhausted Brits in a dented Fiat - it had been an introduction, not an embarrassment. Signor Benedetto had probably told half the valley by now. We were already part of the story, and the story was what made the place.

I touched the little pinnacolo on our roof before bed, just in case.