I have never been so relieved to see a hire car's air conditioning as I was when we finally crawled out of Bari airport last July. My partner had insisted on navigating, which should have been my first warning. Within twenty minutes we were somehow in an industrial estate near Modugno, surrounded by lorries and the distinct feeling that Google Maps had developed a personal vendetta against us. The sat nav kept cheerfully announcing "recalculating" as if this were all tremendous fun. I may have said something unprintable about Puglian road signage. I may have eaten an entire packet of taralli in stressed silence.

Three hours later, when the white walls of our trullo complex finally appeared above the olive groves outside Otranto, I practically wept. The property sat on a gentle slope looking down towards the Adriatic, all honey-coloured stone and terracotta pots crammed with lavender that buzzed with bees in the late afternoon heat. A woman called Rosa met us with keys and a jug of iced lemon water, which I drank in one go like a man emerging from the desert. She showed us round the place - vaulted ceilings, a kitchen that smelled of dried oregano from the previous guests, bedrooms with those thick Puglian shutters that turn midday into midnight. I was already imagining myself as a sort of rustic intellectual, writing profound thoughts on the terrace with a glass of negroamaro. This fantasy lasted approximately until I unpacked my walking boots.

We had come for the coastal hikes, you see. The Sentiero Lu Strittu, the paths around Punta Palascia, the famous lighthouse where Italy meets the dawn. I had researched extensively, by which I mean I had read three blog posts and bought a new rucksack. The plan was simple: early starts, dramatic cliffs, turquoise water, a packed lunch of local cheese and bread, that satisfying ache in the legs that makes the evening wine feel earned.

The first morning we set off at six, smug with our discipline. The path from Torre dell'Orso northwards started beautifully, limestone cliffs dropping to hidden coves, the sea that particular Adriatic blue that looks almost artificial. By eight the temperature had climbed past thirty degrees and my rucksack had developed a suspicious dark patch where my water bottle was leaking. We pressed on, because that is what people with new rucksacks do. By nine I was pouring the last of my water over my head and seriously considering whether I could drink from a brackish stream we crossed. My partner, who had sensibly brought twice as much water, watched me with the expression of someone who has seen this particular film before and did not enjoy the ending.

We turned back at ten, defeated by July in Puglia, passing an ancient olive grove where a farmer was already taking his siesta in the shade of a tree older than the concept of Italy itself. He waved cheerfully. I waved back with the weak enthusiasm of the thoroughly humbled.

That afternoon, lying on the property's terrace with a book I was too tired to read, I had one of those small realisations that holidays sometimes grant you. I had constructed this whole narrative about what the trip should be - the strenuous walks, the self-improvement, the worthy exhaustion. But the weather was telling me something simpler: slow down, you idiot. The Puglian coast in summer is not a place for heroic exertion. It is a place for swimming at eight in the morning when the water is still cool, for long lunches that blur into afternoon stillness, for walking only as far as the nearest rocky beach where you can float on your back and watch swallows darting along the cliff face.

We adapted, of course. Became creatures of dawn and dusk. Rose at five to walk the shorter coastal paths while the limestone still held the night's coolness, the sea below us flat and silver in the early light. The stretch from Otranto harbour to the Baia dei Turchi became our regular route, just enough to justify the evening's orecchiette without requiring emergency rehydration. We discovered that the real magic lay not in covering distance but in stopping - for a swim in a cove we would have marched straight past in our previous mindset, for a conversation with a fisherman mending nets near the old town walls, for the simple pleasure of shade and stillness when the midday sun turned everything white and hazy.

One evening, walking back as the light turned golden and the swifts began their evening circuits, we stopped at a small beach near the property and swam until our fingers wrinkled. The water was warm as bathwater, the salt making us absurdly buoyant. My partner floated beside me, hair spread out like a mermaid who had made poor life choices, and observed that I had finally stopped trying to achieve our holiday. I could not argue. The mishap with the sat nav, the abandoned ambitious hikes, the gradual surrender to the rhythm of the place - it had all led here, to this particular patch of warm sea at this particular moment, with nothing to do but watch the light change on the cliffs above Otranto and feel slightly foolish about all my planning.

We went back to the property as the first bats appeared, showered off the salt, and opened wine on the terrace while the last heat drained from the stone walls around us. Somewhere a dog barked in the distance and was answered by another. The scent of jasmine drifted up from the garden below. I had not written any profound thoughts. I had not completed any impressive walks. I had, however, learned that a holiday can be a conversation with a place rather than a conquest of it, and that sometimes the most important thing you pack is the willingness to change your mind. Also, twice as much water as you think you need. Always twice as much water.