I have never been so grateful to see a swimming pool in my entire life, and that includes the time I fell into the harbour at Whitstable. The drive from Brindisi airport to our trullo outside Ostuni had taken barely forty minutes, but thanks to my spectacular talent for overpacking, it felt like we were relocating to Puglia permanently. Four suitcases for a family of four, and I had somehow convinced myself we would need wellies in southern Italy in July.

The mishap came at the final roundabout before the property. My phone, which had been dangling from a cheap dashboard mount since Bari, chose that precise moment to launch itself into the footwell. I lunged, missed, knocked over a water bottle, and performed what I can only describe as an accidental three-point turn in front of a remarkably patient local in a Fiat Panda. He simply waved. I think he had seen this exact scene a thousand times before. British tourists: predictable as olive groves.

The trullo itself appeared down a dusty track, white-washed cone roofs emerging from the red earth like something from a storybook. Our children, who had spent the flight arguing about who got the window seat and the car journey threatening mutiny over screen time, fell completely silent. That never happens. The silence lasted perhaps four seconds before they spotted the pool, but I will treasure those four seconds forever.

The key was in a lockbox, which I failed to open for an embarrassingly long time. My wife stood with her arms crossed, offering helpful commentary like "have you tried the other code" and "maybe press harder." The children had already begun circumnavigating the property, discovering the outdoor shower, the barbecue area, the hammock strung between two ancient olive trees. When the lock finally clicked, I raised my arms in triumph like I had personally constructed the thing.

Inside, the cool struck me first. Thick stone walls, small windows, that particular hush of old buildings that know how to handle heat. The kitchen opened onto a covered terrace where we would spend most evenings, grilling fish from the market in Ostuni, drinking Primitivo that cost less than a London pint, watching the children become confidently nocturnal. The bedrooms were simple, white, slightly cave-like in the best possible way. Our daughter claimed the twin room immediately, leaving our son with the sofa bed in the living area. He did not mind. He had spotted the television and was already attempting to locate familiar cartoons in an ocean of Italian programming.

I stood in the kitchen that first evening, attempting to make coffee with a moka pot I had only ever seen my father use, and felt something shift. The panic of the journey, the suitcase anxiety, the roundabout humiliation, all of it dissolved into something quieter. Through the window, my wife was showing the children how to identify constellations they had never seen properly before, light pollution being what it is at home. The pool caught the last of the sunset. Somewhere, a dog barked. I burned the coffee, obviously, but nobody mentioned it.

That first night, we slept with the windows open and woke to cicadas and the smell of hot thyme. The children were already in the pool by seven. I made more coffee, did not burn it, and sat on the terrace wondering why we do not build houses like this in Surrey. The answer, I suspect, is that Surrey does not have three hundred days of sunshine and soil this colour.

We did not rush anywhere that first day. We walked to the nearest village for bread and tomatoes, my wife navigating with her phone while I pretended I had any sense of direction. We got slightly lost, found a cat, bought gelato from a place that had no menu and no prices, just a man and a freezer and absolute confidence in his product. It was perfect. The whole point of this sort of holiday, I realised, is precisely that lack of structure, the permission to do very little very slowly, to let the children become bored and then inventive, to eat dinner at nine because the sun only just went down, to measure success by whether the pool filter is working and whether anyone has complained about the wifi speed yet.

Nobody had, by the way. The wifi was patchy. Nobody cared.