I have never been so pleased to see a washing line in my life. After twelve hours of travel that involved a delayed flight to Brindisi, a hire car with suspicious air conditioning, and a sat-nav that insisted San Pancrazio Salentino was "in five hundred metres" for roughly forty minutes, we finally crunched up the gravel drive of our holiday home. I was ready to weep with relief. Then I opened the boot and discovered my suitcase had done something unspeakable to itself. The zip had given up entirely, and my carefully folded clothes had arranged themselves into what can only be described as a modern art installation involving three pairs of trousers and a spilled bottle of suncream. My wife looked at me. I looked at the washing line. We both looked at our two children, who were already arguing about who got the bedroom with the balcony. Welcome to Puglia.

The house itself was one of those proper whitewashed Salento numbers, all thick walls and terracotta tiles, with a small garden that smelled of jasmine and something herby I could not identify. The sort of place where you immediately picture yourself with a glass of something cold, even though it is half past two in the afternoon and you have not had lunch. There was a covered terrace with a wooden table big enough for noisy family dinners, and beyond it a pool that caught the light in that particular southern Italian way that makes everything look slightly golden. I stood there in my suncream-stained shirt and felt the tension of the journey start to loosen.

The children, naturally, had already found the pool and were conducting some kind of splash-based negotiation about diving rights. I left them to it and went to investigate the kitchen, which turned out to be one of those gloriously practical Italian affairs with a proper gas hob, a fridge that actually hummed with purpose, and more terracotta pots than I knew what to do with. There was a small supermarket not five minutes away where we later bought enormous tomatoes, fresh oregano, and a wheel of caciocavallo cheese that I became slightly obsessed with over the course of the week. But that first afternoon, we simply unpacked what we could salvage, hung my ruined clothes on that blessed washing line, and sat on the terrace with bread and olive oil that tasted nothing like the stuff at home.

What struck me most about those first few hours was the particular quality of the quiet. Not silence exactly, because there were cicadas and distant voices and occasionally a scooter, but a kind of settled, unhurried stillness that made you conscious of your own breathing. I found myself slowing down without quite meaning to, pouring another glass of water instead of checking my phone, watching a lizard make its way across the garden wall with more attention than I had given anything in months. It was slightly embarrassing, really, how quickly the rhythms of ordinary life fell away. One moment I was a man fretting about a broken suitcase and a dodgy hire car, the next I was genuinely interested in whether that lizard was going to make it to the bougainvillea.

By evening, the children had established a complicated points system for pool usage, my clothes were drying in the last of the sun, and we had walked to a nearby trattoria where the owner spoke no English and we spoke barely any Italian, but somehow communicated perfectly through gestures and enthusiasm. We ate orecchiette with turnip tops, which sounds like something you would avoid and tastes like something you dream about. Walking back in the warm dark, the children drowsy between us, I thought about how I had worried so much about the journey, the logistics, whether the house would live up to the photographs. I had not accounted for how little any of that would matter once we were actually there, once the simple machinery of a family holiday had started turning: swimming, eating, drying clothes on a line, watching lizards, being together in a place that asked nothing of us except that we slow down and notice it.

I still have that suitcase, incidentally. The zip never recovered. It sits in our loft as a sort of memorial to the holiday, and to my realisation that some things are beyond saving and it does not matter in the slightest.