I will never forget the moment I realised I'd been confidently pronouncing "Ostuni" wrong for six solid months. There I was, sat in a hire car at Brindisi Airport, arguing with the sat nav like it was having a personal go at me. "Os-TOO-nee," I'd been telling everyone. "Lovely place, Os-TOO-nee." The woman at the car hire desk had smiled politely. Now I understand why. She'd heard it all before.

The drive itself was pure Puglia gold, all flat red earth and olive trees that looked older than my entire family tree put together. I had the windows down, some terrible Italian pop radio blaring, and a growing sense that I was properly on holiday now. The mishap came at a roundabout somewhere near San Vito dei Normanni. I took the wrong exit, obviously, and found myself down a farm track between two enormous fields of tomatoes. A man on a scooter appeared from nowhere, waved me down, and proceeded to give me directions in rapid Italian while I nodded like I understood a single word. I caught "sempre dritto" - always straight - and that was my entire navigational strategy for the next twenty minutes. Worked a treat, until it absolutely didn't.

By the time I pulled up to the property, I was forty minutes late, slightly sweaty, and convinced I'd irreversibly damaged the hire car's suspension. The house sat there like it had been waiting centuries, which it probably had - all whitewashed walls and that distinctive Pugliese architecture that makes everything look like it's been bleached by the sun itself. A small cluster of trulli roofs peeked over a neighbouring wall like curious stone hats.

Guiseppe was the first proper local I met, and he set the tone entirely. He's the caretaker, though he'd never use that word - too formal. He emerged from behind an olive tree holding pruning shears and wearing a straw hat that had seen better decades. "You are the English," he announced, not as a question. "You took the tomato road." News travels fast in these parts, apparently. He laughed for a solid minute at my pronunciation of Ostuni, then patiently corrected me: "Oh-STOO-nee." The emphasis on the first syllable, not the middle. All those dinner party conversations where I'd sounded like a complete prat came flooding back.

He showed me round the place with the easy pride of someone who knows every stone personally. The pool area was immaculate, surrounded by those dry-stone walls that Puglia does so beautifully. I made some comment about the heat, something inane like "bit warm," and he fixed me with a look that said I'd just stated something on the level of "water is wet." "August," he said, with the weight of sixty-odd summers behind it. "You should try July."

The neighbours appeared over the wall while I was unpacking, as neighbours do in places where walls are more suggestion than barrier. Maria and her sister Rosa, two women in their seventies who moved with the coordinated efficiency of a comedy double act. They were picking figs from an overhanging tree and immediately pressed three into my hands, still warm from the sun. "You are alone?" Maria asked, with that particular Italian intonation that makes a simple question feel like a gentle interrogation. "No wife? No husband?" I confirmed my solo status and they exchanged a look that contained approximately fourteen volumes of unspoken commentary. "We will bring you pasta tomorrow," Rosa decided, and that was that. No debate permitted.

That evening I walked down to the nearest village, a tiny place that wasn't even on my map properly. The bar was essentially someone's front room with a coffee machine, run by a man called Vito who had opinions on everything and expressed them whether you asked or not. He took one look at me, declared I needed a caffe corretto, and produced an espresso with a slug of something local and potent that made my eyes water. "You are staying near Giuseppe," he said, again not a question. "He talks too much. Good man. Talks too much." This from a man who had not stopped speaking since I walked through his door.

I sat there as the light faded, watching the village do its evening promenade. Old men in immaculate shirts despite the heat, women in pairs discussing things I couldn't understand but could absolutely follow the emotional beats of. A boy of about ten rode past on a bicycle, shouting something to Vito that made him laugh so hard he had to lean on the coffee machine.

Walking back in the dark, slightly wobbly from the corretto, I had one of those moments that holidays sometimes give you. The stars were ridiculous, properly ridiculous, this enormous spill of light across black sky that you just don't get at home. I could hear Giuseppe's dog barking somewhere in the distance, and music from a radio, and the particular silence of olive trees at night. I'd got lost on the tomato road, made a fool of myself in two languages, and been adopted by elderly sisters with a fig-based agenda. And I thought, this is exactly why I came. Not the pool or the trulli roofs or the photographs I'd take, but this slightly chaotic immersion into a place that clearly had no intention of adapting itself to my convenience.

The pasta, incidentally, was magnificent. Arrived at eleven the next morning, still warm, with instructions from Rosa that I was eating it wrong and she'd demonstrate properly at lunch. I didn't argue. You don't argue with Rosa.