The drive down from Bari airport had been one of those classic Puglian experiences that starts out feeling romantic and ends with you questioning every life choice that led you to a hire car with no functioning air conditioning in thirty-two degree heat. I'd been dreaming about this Torre Chianca for months, ever since I'd stumbled across it on a late-night scrolling session that definitely involved a glass of wine too many. A proper old watchtower, converted into a holiday let, sitting right on the coast near Lecce. It sounded impossibly glamorous.

My travelling companion, my long-suffering friend Sarah, had been in charge of navigation. This was our first mistake. Our second mistake was assuming that Italian country roads obeyed any logic recognisable to two women from Derbyshire who considered the Peak District challenging terrain. We wound through olive groves for what felt like hours, the satnav cheerfully announcing "turn left" into what was clearly someone's driveway, or occasionally a field. The smell of hot tarmac and wild fennel filled the car, and Sarah kept insisting we were "nearly there" from roughly the moment we left the airport.

The mishap, when it came, was almost impressively stupid. We'd finally spotted the tower in the distance, a honey-coloured cylinder rising above the low scrubland, and I may have got slightly overexcited. I grabbed my phone to take a photograph through the windscreen, completely forgetting I was still holding the bottle of water I'd been nursing for the past hour. The bottle, naturally, was uncapped. The resulting fountain drenched my lap, my phone, and most of the centre console. Sarah swerved. I yelped. A passing dog barked at us with what I can only describe as justified contempt. We arrived at the property with me looking like I'd had a small but significant accident, and Sarah laughing so hard she'd developed a stitch.

The owner, a wonderfully patient man named Marco who clearly had seen worse in his time renting to British tourists, pretended not to notice my damp state. He led us through a heavy wooden door into cool, thick-walled silence that felt like stepping into a different century. The tower had been renovated with what I can only describe as respectful restraint. The original stone spiral staircase wound upwards, the steps worn smooth by centuries of feet. Small windows punched through walls that must have been a metre thick, framing sudden rectangles of blinding blue sea.

I dumped my bag in the ground-floor bedroom, still slightly soggy, and immediately climbed to the roof terrace. The view stopped me properly for the first time since that water bottle incident. The Adriatic stretched out in that particular shade of blue that makes you understand why people write poems about this coastline. Directly below, a small rocky cove gave way to clearer water than any beach I'd seen in years of Mediterranean holidays. A few local fishing boats bobbed at anchor. Somewhere distant, a radio played Italian pop from the nineties.

Sarah appeared beside me with two glasses of the local Negroamaro that Marco had pressed upon us, still smirking about my earlier performance. We stood there in the late afternoon heat, slightly delirious from travel and relief and the particular disorientation of finding yourself somewhere that looks exactly as advertised, which never happens. The tower felt substantial in a way modern buildings simply don't. You sensed the weight of its history without any of that museum-piece stuffiness. Someone had lived here, once, watching for threats from the sea. Now two knackered women from the Midlands were drinking red wine on their roof and arguing about whether we could be bothered to find a supermarket or just eat bread and cheese for dinner.

We chose bread and cheese, obviously. Some decisions make themselves.